Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [22]
They stop for a drink in a roadside bar. Once back in the car, Cooper separates the money equally into four piles, and puts his in an old Northwest Airlines bag. Then they drive again, the last leg, with the windows down, the highway breeze sideswiping him. At one point he slows the car to a halt and she says, ‘What is it?’ There is an owl on the road, apparently unwilling to leave the heat of the highway, and Coop drives around it and continues. When they reach the bus depot at Tonapah, he sits a moment longer, his hands on the wheel, as if there were still miles to go. They get out and Ruth comes around to the driver’s door and they embrace. Coop is going to disappear. He will never see these friends again. He pulls out the Northwest Airlines bag and walks away from the car. Ruth starts it and a moment later drives past him—a tap on the horn, her hand out the window—but he doesn’t acknowledge the second farewell. He has already become a stranger.
At seven-thirty the next morning, when Dorn and Mancini arrive for breakfast at the River Café, Ruth is sitting alone in the slightly chaotic restaurant. Four waitresses in rubber boots are wading in the artificial river that has flooded, searching under large rocks in order to find the pump plug that malfunctioned during the night. ‘River’s in mourning,’ Mancini says. They are aware that Cooper, their ‘heir,’ is the one blackballed for life, certainly from all the big casinos. They also know that the three of them are in some way permanently linked to him. But rather than talk about it, they watch the waitresses, who are now laughing and beginning to enjoy themselves, splashing in the water.
Le Manouche
She was following a path of gorse, her face and fair hair in the litter of light from the high branches of oak above her; she was moving at a fast pace ever since the incident a few days earlier when she had encountered the four men with their guns and dogs. They had been standing at a small crossroads in the woods, arguing, all barking at one another, and as she came near, the men threw out suggestive comments in French that she had understood but pretended not to. The atmosphere of threat had unnerved her. In spite of the episode, Anna had refused to give up her afternoon walks. She would take the forest path, come into the clearing, and then follow the river until she reached the paved road a half-mile from the village of Dému. It was a walk on the edge of a run. In Dému she bought groceries, put them in her backpack, and then turned home. At that speed she was there in an hour and a half. The house was a manoir, and she was a temporary tenant in the place. She had thought at first that it might be a château, but it wasn’t quite that. She had never stayed in a French château, just as she had never seen a hunting dog until that afternoon with the belligerent men.
Most days Anna worked indoors at a kitchen table, reading the manuscripts and the handwritten journals of Lucien Segura. The manoir had once been the writer’s home, and she found herself in some modest contrapuntal dance with him. So that when she looked up from her work, it took a moment to recognize the same doorways and the room around her—she had until that moment been immersed in unearthing and cross-referencing a detail from this French writer’s life, delving below the surface of his work. A phrase among one of her colleagues described what she was doing as ‘sweeping the translator’s house.’ And she knew if she ascended the flight of stone stairs and turned left she would be in his bedroom, could look down onto