And if someone showed up at daybreak to show the house? Or if some neighbor with a place farther along on the dirt road noticed his car as he drove by?
He drove instead to the barn, and parked his car where it wouldnt be seen. He shared the barn with an owl, who made more noise than he did, and some unidentifiable rodents, who made as little noise as possible, as intent on avoiding the owl as he was on avoiding human beings. The place smelled of animals and hay mold and other less definable barn odors, but he figured he was a long ways away from the nearest human, and that was worth something. He spread some straw around, smoothed it out, and stretched out on it, and he wound up getting a good nights sleep for his troubles.
On his way out the next morning he went and had a look at the Ford. The wheels were off, as hed noted earlier, and somebody had pulled the engine, but the old car still sported a pair of license plates. TENNESSEE / THE VOLUNTEER STATE, he read, and there didnt seem to be anything on the plate to indicate the year. Rust made one of the bolts hard to turn, but he kept at it, and when he drove out of there the Sentra had Tennessee tags, and his Iowa plates were tucked out of sight under some straw in a corner of the barn.
The motel he found outside of Jackson had a sign on the counter indicating that one Sanjit Patel was its proprietor, but evidently this particular Patel had raised himself to that level of the American dream where he could hire people outside his family, and even outside his tribe. The young
man behind the counter was a light-skinned African-American whose name tag identified him as Aaron Wheldon. He had a long oval face and short hair, wore glasses with heavy black rims, and beamed at Kellers approach, showing a lot of teeth. Bart Simpson! My main man!
Keller smiled in return, asked the price of a room, learned it was $49. He put three twenties on the counter and pushed the proffered registration card an inch or so toward the young man. Maybe you could fill this out for me, he said. After a pause he added, I wouldnt need a receipt.
Wheldons eyes were thoughtful behind the thick lenses. Then he smiled broadly again and handed over a room key and a ten-dollar bill. With tax the room ought to come to something like $53, Keller knew, but ten dollars change struck him as a good compromise, because the state of Mississippi wouldnt see the tax, anymore than Sanjit Patel would see any of the fifty dollars.
And I misspoke, Wheldon said, saying Bart Simpson when anybody can see thats his daddy Homer on your cap. Yall have a nice evening, Mr. Simpson.
Sure, and I never saw you, sir.
In the room, he turned on the TV and switched channels until he found CNN, and as usual he watched half an hours worth of news before checking to see what else was available. And in the morning he found a coin box and bought a newspaper.
On his way south through Pennsylvania, hed been able to pick up the New York Times , and he read a second story about the White Plains fire, this one informing him that the identification of charred remains as the body of Dorothea Harbison had been confirmed through dental records. That ended a hope hed barely allowed himself to entertain, that somehow the body could have been that of someone else.
As the days passed, Keller kept buying the paper USA Today on weekdays, whatever else he could find on the weekend. The coverage of the assassination and its aftermath seemed to fade and shrink right in front of him. Years ago Keller had developed a mental mechanism for coping with the reality of his work, picturing his victim, then leaching the color out of the image in his mind, turning it to a black-and-white picture. A series of further steps softened its focus and backed away from it, making it look smaller and smaller until it was nothing but a gray dot that winked and was gone. The technique was effective but not permanent years later, a person hed worked hard to forget might suddenly pop up in his mind, life-size and in color but it had got him through some potentially difficult times, and now he saw that all hed done was anticipate reality. Because time, unassisted by human will, did much the same thing on its own, as stories bloomed and faded from the news, their visibility diminished by some new outrage that burst out alongside them and replaced them entirely as objects of human interest.
It happened in the media, and when he thought about it he realized it happened much the same way in ones own consciousness, without effort and even in spite of effort. Things faded, blurred, lost their focus or simply came to mind less frequently, and with less force.
He didnt have to search for an example. Some years ago hed owned a dog, a fine Australian cattle dog named Nelson, and hed arranged for a young woman named Andria to walk it for him. One thing had led to another, until he and Andria had come to share far more than Nelsons leash. Hed cared for her, and bought her a great many pairs of earrings, and then one day she left, and took the dog with her.