Night passage

“What about the blue seersucker?” he said.

“Blue looks good on you, Hasty,” Cissy said.

“New chief of police is arriving this week,” Hasty said, “from California.”

“Didn’t you meet him already?”

“Chicago. Burke and I went out to interview the finalists. Stayed at the Palmer House.”

Hasty pulled out the blue seersucker and put it on and turned so Cissy could see him.

“Good,” she said. “Are you going to wear that plaid bow tie?”

“You think I should?”

“It would go very nicely with that shirt and jacket.”

“All right, then,” Hasty said and took it off the tie rack on the back of the closet door.

“Is he a nice boy?” Cissy said.

“The new chief? Well, I hope he’s more than that,” Hasty said. “But he is young, and looks younger than he is. And he has a good record.”

“And he’ll fit in?” Cissy said.

“Yes, we were careful about that,” Hasty said. “That was one of Tom Carson’s problems, so we were all especially alert to that. He’s one of us. Not wealthy of course, but the right background generally. College-educated, too.”

“Really? What school?”

“Out there,” Hathaway said. “One of the big ones, USC, UCLA, I can’t keep them straight. Criminal justice. He took courses at night.”

“It’s always a shame, I think, when a young man can’t get the full college experience. You know, not only classes, but football games and pep rallies, proms, intense discussions in the dorms.”

“I know, but many young men are not as fortunate as we were. They have to make do.”

“Yes.”

As he did every morning Hathaway had a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast and two cups of coffee. Cissy sat across from him in her bathrobe with black coffee and a cigarette. He had quit twenty years earlier. They both wished she could quit, but she couldn’t, and they had concluded that there was no point discussing it. She was a tallish woman with a youthful body. She rarely wore makeup, and if she did it was only lipstick. Her blond hair was starting to show silver and she wore it long. It looked nice with her youthful face.

“Well,” he said, “have to run. Got a bank to run. Got a town to manage.”

“Busy, busy,” she said.

It was what she always said, because that was what he always said. She put her cheek up to be kissed. He kissed it and left, walking out the back door and down the driveway toward the town hall. His clothes always looked slightly unfashionable, as if he had spent money on them a long time ago and then outgrown them. The trouser cuffs were always too high. The jacket sleeves always showed too much shirtsleeve. His belt seemed too high and the waist of his suit coat always seemed a little pinched. Like her smoking, it was something put aside in the long years of marriage, under the heading “for better, for worse.” She put his cereal bowl and coffee cup in the sink, poured herself another cup of coffee, and lit another cigarette and hugged her robe a little snugger around her and looked out at the flower garden which occupied most of her backyard. She’d been flattered to marry a man from such a good family. Later maybe she’d take a bath and shave her legs.

Chapter 5

The first day’s drive had been tan and parched, the hillsides littered with beige rocks. Every once in a while a tiny fu

“Where you headed,” he said with that indefinable Indian accent.

“Massachusetts,” Jesse said.

The two men looked at each other.

“Massachusetts,” one of them said.

“All the way to Massachusetts?” the other one said.

“Yeah.”

“Driving?”

“All the way,” Jesse said.

“You got to be shitting me, mister. Massachusetts?”

Jesse nodded.

“Massachusetts,” he said.

“Jeesus!”

The pump shut off and Jesse went into the tiny station to pay. There was some motor oil on a shelf. There was the electronic cash register on a tiny counter. There was a fat old Indian woman at the register in a red tee shirt that had “Harrah’s” printed across the front in black letters. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of her mouth and she squinted through the smoke as she took Jesse’s money and rang it up. The rest of the store was filled with stacked cartons of cigarettes.

“Cigarettes?” she said.

“Don’t smoke.”

She shrugged. As Jesse pulled away from the pumps he could see the two Indian men looking after him, talking excitedly. Massachusetts! There was nothing else in the shale and scrub landscape but the station and the two men. . . . The first time he met Je