Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [16]
He swerved for an animal carcass, not braking at all.
“Bet you thought I was some type of criminal,” he told me.
“Well …”
“Want to know the truth?”
I waited. He shot his eyes over at me, shot them back. In the dark his face was hard to read. “Whole trouble is this: I’m a victim of impulse,” he said.
“Of—?”
“Impulse.”
“Oh.”
“Buddy of mine told me that,” he said. “Guy name of Oliver. Oliver Jamison. This real smart character I hooked up with in the training school when him and me was teenagers. See, he didn’t care. If they was to lock him up, why, he’d just pull out a book and commence to reading, that was the type of a guy he was. Me, I like to go crazy if I am locked up. I mean it. I like to go crazy. I’ll do anything I must to get away. You take that training school, I busted an ankle jumping out the chaplain’s bathroom window there. I ran clear to the woods on a busted ankle. Only had a month left to go, too. That’s when this Oliver says what he says. When they brung me back he says, ‘Jake,’ he says, ‘you’re a victim of impulse.’ Thing stuck in my mind. ‘You’re a victim of impulse,’ he says to me.”
He turned onto a highway, some little two-lane thing leaving the city. The engine made a snarling sound. “People who hold the power are the ones that don’t mind locks,” Jake said. “Now, Oliver, he was pretty cool. I liked that Oliver. I would call him O.J. He had this interest in blowing things up. I mean kid stuff—bombs in mailboxes. He would make the bombs by hand. He sure was smart. After they taken a look at the damage this chemical company offered him a scholarship, but he turned it down. Well, I get his point. See, mailboxes, there’s a real satisfaction to a mailbox. But you don’t want to go to work for no chemical company.”
A driver heading toward us flashed his lights, no doubt so Jake would lower his beams, but Jake didn’t seem to notice.
“What I told him was, ‘It’s circumstances somewhat too. It ain’t entirely impulse,’ I’d say. I mean you take this afternoon, for instance. Take a while back. Accidents, bad timing, dumb guy pulling a piece … you get what I mean? I lack good luck. I am not a lucky man.”
“Well, I don’t understand how you can say that,” I told him.
“Huh?”
“What if this car hadn’t started, for instance? Back at the service station. It was in for repairs, remember. What if it hadn’t started after you’d gone and chained the … and what if there’d been no key? Lots of places take better care than that, they keep the keys in the cash register or something. Or if the boy had been standing outside, what then?”
“Why, I would get a car from somewheres else,” Jake said.
“But—”
“Like, you could go to a snorkel box. Ever hear of that? Snorkel mailbox. Jam the slot so a letter don’t properly fall inside it. Guy drives up in his car, tries to stuff a letter through, gets out to see what went wrong. Leaving his key in of course and engine running, door wide open. All you got to do is hop in. Simple. See?”
“But then he would know right away,” I said. “He could be after you so fast.”
“Now, there you got it,” Jake said. He snapped his fingers. “You caught it straight off. I wouldn’t never choose that method if I had other ways open to me.”
“Right,” I said, and then remembered. “Yes, but what I mean is, how can you say you’re not lucky when it all went off so well?”
He turned. I could feel him staring at me. He said, “Lucky? Is that what you call it? When some fool turns up armed and a camera flips on and you get this lady on your hands you never bargained for, it’s lucky?”
“Well …”
“It’s circumstances, working against me,” said Jake. “Like I told Oliver: I surely don’t plan it like this. Events get out of my control. But Oliver, oh, he could be such a smart-ass. ‘Your whole life is out of your control,’ that