The Fugitives (11 page)

She sat and gazed at the defaced photo, holding her purse on her lap. She exhibited neither anger nor amusement. The vandal worked with careful stealth, although it might have been anyone. (Nables was the only person in the office Kat had written off as a suspect: she was pretty certain he would be intent on protecting a man’s right to be ugly.) She reached out and peeled the paper tongue from the picture, exposing the featureless line of Justin’s mouth, curled into a smirk. The speech balloon she left alone. She felt that this might illustrate the proper limits of the joke. Then she went to work.

She had three photos to begin with. One had been taken at the time of Jackie Saltino’s arrest after he’d beaten up Henry I. Baumann, the unfortunately stingy delivery recipient. His unformed face might have belonged to any one of a thousand kids living in Bay Ridge or Carroll Gardens: half boy, half calzone. He wore an expression of querulous impatience. The next was from Saltino’s Michigan driver’s license. In imprinting itself on his face, middle age had taken care to correct the indistinctness of youth. Creases worn into his skin framed his mouth, minute pouches drooped from either side of his chin. His hairline was up. Bags had formed under his eyes. Acne had left ruts and craters in his cheeks. The expression had softened considerably. Now he seemed about to ask a deferential question of the photographer.

The third photo was of the storyteller, Salteau, and was printed on a program from the Northport Lighthouse and Maritime Festival. The man wore a white straw hat, a white-and-black buckskin vest embroidered with red diamonds over a pale blue polo shirt, and jeans. The graying hair was tightly braided on both sides, each braid tapering to a neat point that just touched his collarbone. He had on sunglasses and was standing in three-quarter view, holding a ceremonial drum. It was hard to tell from the photos if Salteau and Saltino were the same man; if the resemblance was unmistakable or simply propped up by her hopes. Still, how important context was. You might want to say, this couldn’t be Saltino because it just isn’t Saltino: I just can’t imagine it. Lack of imagination was a predictable quality among reporters, cops, and lovers. To them, habit equaled fate. To erase yourself completely was commonly thought to be the most difficult of feats. Most people’s identities were important to them, something they wouldn’t shed. It was proud, it was timid, it was laudable, it was stupid. It stuck people with dumb friends and crummy marriages. Trapped them in dead towns and murderous neighborhoods. It manufactured tradition from the uninterrupted drudgery of successive generations. It transformed ignorant belief into folklore, and ignorance itself into defiance. Identity was a trap. Kat decided at that moment that Salteau and Saltino were the same man. She knew somehow that Saltino was perverse enough to pull this off; not to run home to Brooklyn, where his seventy-six-year-old mother still lived on Third Avenue, not to wash up in Atlantic City or Las Vegas, not to do anything except stash the money in his shoe and find the least likely persona to inhabit while hiding in plain sight. It fit him. He must have been preparing for this for years, learning how to bide time while he learned how to do time. The old violence aside, Saltino had not become a flashy or intemperate man. In fact, he’d become exactly the sort of person you’d routinely trust with a satchel of cash, too reliable to do anything but handle it as instructed. Kat could imagine an operator like Argenziano, with his Vegas Gentry voice, patronizing a Saltino, making fun of him behind his back, occasionally deigning to feel sorry for his bad breaks and fractured ambitions. Saltino had been shedding who he was all along, right under their noses, waiting for the right moment. The same man who’d beaten Henry I. Baumann with a bicycle pump had each month uneventfully driven a Ford with tens of thousands of dollars in it to Staten Island and then turned around and driven back. If he was in the habit of stopping for the night on the way east, then it would be a full day before anybody even thought about wondering where he was. With twenty-four hours’ head start, he could drive maybe a thousand miles. Or so they’d think. Had he been amused by the plan he’d come up with?

The program read:

JOHN SALTEAU has presented Native American stories, songs, and dances at the Cherry City Cherry Festival, the Cultural Awareness Celebration in Cheboygan, Native Tradition Days in Saginaw, the Sleeping Bear Folklore Fair in Glen Arbor, and at Interlochen’s Summer Arts for Kids Festival, and he performs regularly in libraries, schools, and other educational and cultural settings. A full-blooded Ojibway Indian, Salteau has worked as a lumberjack, a construction worker, a long-distance trucker, and a short order cook. He recently returned to Northwest Michigan after an absence of twenty years.

Nice little foxhole there to climb into. Twenty years, and you know the way Indians died off, pickling themselves with hair tonic and smoking their lungs black with tax-free cigarettes and stuffing their arteries with trans fats. Who’d be left to remember who had been where? She liked, too, the Boy’s Book litany of romantic occupations, the sorts of jobs that she could see a predelinquent Saltino thrilling to in his cot in Darkest Brooklyn. There had to be a thousand of these storytellers plying their trade around the Great Lakes, each with some mythically gritty background, like you couldn’t strum a guitar or shake a rattle if you programmed computers or adjusted insurance claims. Not all of them pretended to be Indians, though that wasn’t unheard of either. It was just another of the hustles that Indian culture had been reduced to. Blankets, pots, storytelling, casino gambling. It amused her that it was the last that struck so many people as being particularly profane. She looked at the picture of Salteau, banging that drum with the palm of his hand. There were the acne scars. She straightened three fingers and, joining them, rapidly drummed them against her open mouth:
woo woo woo woo woo woo woo woo!

9

S
HE
assembled him piece by piece, out of scraps, a flyer here, listings of some town’s Weekender coverage there. She came across a dozen pictures on Flickr of a performance he’d given in Manistee. She almost wished, just to be able to feel surprised, that she didn’t already know what the pictures themselves, and their captions, told her: John Salteau, Manistee, June 2007. That was all. Crowds and sunshine. Baseball caps, T-shirts tucked neatly into creased, acid-wash jeans. White sneakers. She went to Borders and read children’s books on Native American legends. Atrocious books, really, all pretending to a kind of overarching wisdom about life and death, a native understanding of the delicate communion between man, nature, and spirit; standard stuff. Just once she’d like to read a story about some hunter getting his face ripped off by a grizzly. The best Indian story she’d ever heard had to do with a captured Oglala Sioux who’d laughingly denigrated his torturers’ mothers, sisters, and daughters while they sliced off his nose, his ears, gouged out his eyes. That wasn’t in any of these books, though. But it wasn’t as if anyone actually reviewed Salteau, i.e., discussed what he said, sang, or danced critically or in any kind of detail. Uniformly, the news items were of the “and a good time was had by all” variety, touching equally on the storytelling, the candle-dipping, the cherry pie, the weather. She worried that Nables’s doubts were quietly being vindicated. What exactly did she want out of this? She sucked hard on a nicotine lozenge, shoved her hair out of her face. Corroboration might be key. She ogled the pictures on Flickr hungrily but discovered that the disguise he’d assembled was impregnably generic, a particularly colorful piece of clip art. That she could
know
without confirmation was the investigative challenge that she was encountering for the first time in her career. She had Becky’s claims, but she doubted somehow that Becky would go on the record. She kept digging around, unearthing endless discrete information. Magic of the Internet: a trillion “facts,” zero cohesion. Or, rather, total cohesion: the Internet managed to atomize the patterns of individual lives into their endlessly replicable fractal components; the announcements, the rosters, the rankings, the professional listings, the genealogical discussions, the court decrees, the quotes, the miniature scandals, the obits, all the endless vanities gratified by the free availability of massive server racks in climate-controlled facilities.

Then she discovered that Salteau had a regular gig at a public library in Cherry City. Twenty-minute drive from Manitou Sands, some balls. A storm system was lacing North Dakota and Minnesota with snow, snow measured in feet, and was heading southeast, so Kat arranged her trip literally on the go, making the plane reservations via phone as she took a cab to her place to pack an overnight bag. She was worried that the airport in Cherry City might close, that he might disappear for real. It was a possibility. She asked the cab to wait for her.

Justin behaved with calm agitation after she entered the apartment, following her from room to room and wringing his hands. Who ever would have thought that she’d pray there wouldn’t be conversation? The dream of her life, growing up with a grandfather who might say three dozen words to her in a day, was to hear talk all the time, no haven’t-had-my-coffee-yet, no just-let-me-relax—and now silence suited her at home. Silence was peace. What a life. There’s always the door, Kat, she said to herself. Take down a bigger bag and pack it with more things and don’t come back. Justin followed her around and then parked himself on the threshold of the sunporch, cruciform, one hand gripping either side of the broad frame in which the flung-open double doors were hung, his back to the bright little unheated room. He watched her as she moved around the apartment, swiftly gathering her things. Didn’t even need a bigger bag. The days of the steamer trunk were over. Just needed her phone, her laptop, a wallet full of cards, and she could begin a new life this afternoon if she wanted. Nothing had to tie her to a place or to a past. She knew that. Personal history was a string of numbers. The days of the orally preserved reputation were over. The numbers just had to add up to something neither delinquent nor criminal and match the name. Who cares who had done what to whom? The days of the small town were over. It just took a plane ticket to discover that the balm of night could make anyplace feel like home. Home was within the pages of the right magazine. Your authority derived from the story you recognized to be about yourself. You adopted it, told it, then found other people who told the same story. The days of evading witnesses were over. The witnesses eliminated themselves; faded into the fabric of new jobs, new cities, new pastimes, new friends; multiple vectors diverging from a common originating point. The days of
people
were over. It was a vast democratic plurality of groups out there—political parties, associations, alumni, fans, account holders, veterans, employees, signatories, professions, and end users. Join and vanish. Learn the secret handshake, get the secret haircut. Try to be a
person
and you realized just how alone you really were. The only thing to do was to break away, shed what marked you before you were shed and disowned.

She didn’t see how making any big gestures would help now, though. The days of big gestures were over too, for her, at least. Big gestures were a threat after a certain age, the destabilizing activity of dangerous people. At her stage of life, everything was about—the jargon rhapsodized about—incremental growth and change. Any duplicity could be rationalized and explained away by the exhibition of some painstakingly acquired sophistication: a degree, a job, a cause, a taste for vintage vinyl. She’d been absolutely ruthless to Danhoff, kind man that he was, leaving without warning and then serving him with papers, and the nicely stage-managed theme of that betrayal had been “Outgrowing the Older Man.” To Danhoff, yeah, it probably had seemed like a big gesture, but that was her particular shot at incremental growth and change, and his friends had forgiven her almost as lavishly as they’d pitied him. Familiar soap story, a woman figuring out on the wing what marriage actually meant to her, free to discard her superseded choice. The common perception of her purity of motive had been established by her disinterest in pursuing her legal right to their community property, though the Craftsman house she’d kindly ceded to him must have been the coldest of comforts.

The very same suitcase she’d packed back then sat waiting for her on the shelf in the closet. She had no idea why she now felt stuck where she was. A matter of paralysis. Or of dreading the hang-time interval spent in the situation between situations, afflicted with the saddest of nostalgias for a contentment that hadn’t existed. Growth and change, inconsistency and destruction. She just wanted to get on the plane before the storm came down and shut the airport.

“When are you coming back?” Justin asked.

“I have things scheduled through Thursday morning. And I’ll probably need to talk to people, do some driving around. I don’t know. Friday afternoon maybe?”