Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [20]
THAT WHOLE DAY as we drove she slept in the backseat, curled up with her hands under her chin. I had decided to head north, staying off the freeways for the most part. When it was evening, I pulled into a motel and she went right from the car to the bed, where she got under the covers and went immediately back to sleep. I didn’t take any chance that she would wake up and watch the TV, so I pulled the plug and bent it out of shape before I went to the restaurant they had there and watched for myself on the bar TV. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson were shown hugging their baby and laughing through their tears. They were not the youngest of couples, they were both on the portly side, and in fact Mr. Wilson had a paunch on him to make me think I would never let myself go that way. And it turned out they had six other children of various sizes standing around the couch looking at the camera with what I recognized as the same unsmiling quietness of expression as Baby Wilson himself.
Meanwhile an announcer was telling the story of the return, and quoting Mr. Wilson saying he and his wife were so happy they forgave whoever had kidnapped their child, but before I could breathe a sigh of relief, the camera cut to the FBI official in charge of the investigation and he said that the FBI would continue the search—that, regardless of the outcome, a federal crime had been committed and it was never up to the Wilsons to decide whether or not to prosecute. And then another shot of the bad drawing of Karen.
In the gift shop there I bought a pair of sunglasses and an Angels baseball cap, and we got up at dawn and drove away. Karen wore the glasses and that cap with her hair tucked up inside all the way through California. I used the credit cards sparingly, each one never more than once until the last one, which I hazarded a couple of times and then threw it away, not wanting to press my luck, and now we were down to our diminishing cash funds.
In San Francisco, I parked Karen in a movie theater and went around to Noe Street to see if Fran still lived there. She did. When she opened her door, she said, Well, will you look what the cat dragged in! Fran was never the sort to bear a grudge. She was a song stylist who made her living singing in clubs. She had a housemate now, a kind of blowsy older woman, who nevertheless had the tact to excuse herself on some errand or other, probably to her chosen bar. I visited with Frannie almost the whole two hours of a feature movie, and then she walked with me to the ATM at the local grocery. As I left, I swore I would return her generosity in full. I knew she didn’t believe me, because she gave a good-hearted laugh and said time would tell and she was smiling and shaking her head as I waved and turned the corner.
Just before the Oregon state line, I removed the Nevada plates from the Windstar and replaced them with the Durango’s old California plates.
In Seattle, we took the ferry to Canada, standing at the rail in the gray and green mist of that day, with the foghorns coming over the water and the smell of the sea and gulls appearing and disappearing in the bad visibility. Karen loved this part of the trip. There was a new peace between us, and she held my arm with both her hands with a kind of fervent wifeliness.
At the hotel in Vancouver we resumed our lovemaking as in our first days together and it was action-packed. She had really come awake to life as I realized now, reflecting on the last months between us, when she was more withdrawn than I wanted to admit.
Vancouver is a squeaky-clean town, like all of Canada that I have ever seen—glass office buildings the color of the sky, the waterside filled with flag-flying yachts and motorboats, the downtown without litter of any kind, and everyone going about their business so as not to disturb anyone else. Not