The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,81

began plotting escapes. I felt that I would soon be able to run again. Still, every time I began to reach for the door handle, Norbert looked up from his puzzles. Whenever I considered jerking the steering wheel, driving off the road or into oncoming traffic, I lost nerve. Upon entering the Hoosier State, where I and, Iola informed me, Kurt Vonnegut had been born, I thought Norbert had finally fallen asleep. I quietly turned on my cellphone, but Norbert’s eyes popped open; he asked if I knew what happened to writers who disobeyed him, and when I said I didn’t, he snarled, “They get taken out of circulation.” He reached forward, grabbed the phone, and flung it out the window.

A lifetime ago, I could have used that phone to call someone who lived nearby and who might have helped me—my dad or some of his colleagues at the university, my high school buddies from our little writing club, our next-door neighbors, who watched our house whenever I had to stay overnight at the hospital with my dad. But tonight, my home state was every bit as strange and desolate as the others through which we had already passed.

As a teenager in Indiana, I had read and reread On the Road, The Subterraneans, and The Dharma Bums and fantasized about kerouacking my way across America, getting onto the highway and seeking the promise of the undiscovered country. But now my life had become the opposite of a road novel—the end of my odyssey loomed before me not as a promise but as a threat.

Along our route, I paid for everything with my credit cards, hoping to create some trail. Maybe if this ordeal lasted a month, American Express or MasterCard would send some bounty hunter after me. I bought gas for Iola’s Opel at Texacos, meals at McDonald’s and Ponderosa—my companions never offered to pay and never let me out of their sight. Iola pumped the gas, Norbert always stood behind me on line for food, took the urinal next to mine in the john. And when I was too bleary to drive anymore and I turned off I-70 and paid for a night in a Red Roof Inn, Iola and Norbert insisted that we share a room, a smoker’s double with a radiator that exhaled heat that smelled like a locker room. There, Iola slept on a proust in front of the door, Norbert on one against the locked windows, while I took the floor between them, wondering when someone might find me and how, wondering if I would ever be able to sleep at all, then waking up to find that the night had passed far too quickly, and that it was time to get back in the car.

Across the Missouri-Kansas border, I began driving slower and made more frequent stops. I kept hoping Iola and Norbert would falter, let me out of their sight, make the mistake of trusting me. Just one slip, and I could run. By now, I had regained more of my strength, but I also found myself again succumbing to one of my worst tendencies—distrusting people at a distance while sympathizing with them up close. Even with a canino pointed at me, even with my shoulders still aching and my palms sweating as I gripped the steering wheel, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Iola and Norbert, hoodwinked by a con to which I was already wise.

Past Topeka, the sun began to dip before us. I could now identify each of the parts of my body that did and did not feel pain. My back was still sore, my wrists and ankles, too. But my legs and arms felt stronger. We were driving along Route 177 when the sun finally disappeared beneath the horizon, and signs began to appear ahead for Lake Eureka, Climax, and Manhattan. Iola reached over, flicked the turn signal, tugged at the steering wheel, and pulled a hard right to exit the highway.

A DESOLATE FIELD

Iola Jaffe had scanned every reference volume and anthology that Norbert had handed to her in the Opel, but she still seemed no closer to finding The Tale of Genji. Now, as we stood outside the car, she held her book of maps. Norbert held his gun. In a back pocket, I carried a flashlight Iola had given me, and in my right hand, I held the shovel that had been lying in the trunk. The shovel had a rusted metal blade