Out beyond the tracks, the warehouses gave way to billboards. Some of them advertised HBO and termite extermination services. More of them advertised cigarettes and Jesus Christ. It was as if the only way to save your soul was to die of lung cancer while praying.
I have to stop this, Gregor told himself.
Then he stood up and began to get his luggage down off the overhead rack. The train was swaying so much, he nearly fell twice.
Out on the tracks, a billboard with Jesse Helms’s face on it appeared out of nowhere, fat and round and big enough to swallow Detroit.
2
THE FIRST THING GREGOR noticed about North Carolina was that the women there dressed in brighter colors than the women in Philadelphia. Where train stations in Philly were full of brown and black and beige, this one was overrun with pastels and primaries. Gregor saw a woman in a lemon yellow suit and lemon yellow shoes, and another in a dress that must have been fuchsia. She had fuchsia shoes on, too. Then there was the hair, and the makeup. Bennis Hannaford went weeks without wearing makeup. Gregor didn’t think Donna Moradanyan had ever worn any makeup at all. These women all seemed to have eye shadow coordinated with their nail polish—and their nail polish wasn’t chipped, either. How did women learn to do things like this to themselves? What did it mean that they did? Gregor threaded his way carefully through them, realizing, after a while, that he had started to be much more polite, and much more tentative, than he usually was around women. Maybe that was supposed to be the point, but he didn’t think Bennis Hannaford’s thoroughly feminist soul would like it any.
David Sandler was waiting for him at the place where the platforms spilled their passengers into the main concourse. It wasn’t much of a concourse, not like the one in Philadelphia, but it was bright and clean and cheerful. Even David Sandler was cheerful. Gregor was used to him in his Columbia University professor mode: tweed jackets, dark ties, dark slacks, black leather shoes. This David Sandler was wearing a pair of battered-looking chinos and a bright orange T-shirt. He was carrying a sky blue windbreaker in his hands. Obviously, Gregor thought, whatever it was about colors that had infected the female half of the North Carolina population had infected the male half just as much.
Gregor excused himself to a young woman in a green-and-white-striped skirt and three miles of curling dark hair and waved to David Sandler with the hand he was holding the briefcase in. David held out his own hand and captured the briefcase.
“There you are,” he said to Gregor. “I didn’t recognize you. You look depressed as hell.”
“Thanks a lot,” Gregor said.
“I’m the one who’s supposed to be depressed as hell,” David said. “I guess I am, most of the time. But it was a good ride up here. North Carolina is a beautiful place.”
They were headed out of the terminal into the parking lot. All Gregor could see were cars and billboards.
“Is Bellerton far from here?” he asked. “I tried to look it up on the map, but all I got was confused. You get down to the coast and it looks like you run out of road.”
“You do, sort of. Bellerton’s not on any kind of main thoroughfare. It’s on the water.”
“I know that, David.”
“Yeah, well. There are advantages to being out of the way like that. Things you wouldn’t necessarily think about. Like drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“Right.” David was leading them across the parking lot, threading them through cars and pickup trucks. “The two big drug routes on this side of the country are 95 and 301. Anyplace with access to either of those highways tends to be absolutely full of dope. Why not? You’re going to run a shipment up to New York, you might as well stop off in a few small towns on the way and make a fast buck or two. Drugs.”
“And Bellerton doesn’t have drugs,” Gregor said carefully.
David snorted. “Of course Bellerton has drugs, Gregor. Two-bit elementary schools in Montana have drugs these days. Bellerton doesn’t have as many drugs as, say, Raleigh itself. Or Chapel Hill. Anyway,” David said, “it isn’t only the drugs. It’s the tourists. We get tourists. We get a lot of tourists. I started out down here as a tourist. The thing is, we don’t get the kind of crowds you get in places like Hatteras. It’s quieter that way.”
Gregor thought of all the clippings in his briefcase. “I wouldn’t think it was very quiet now. With the Oklahoma City thing on hold for the moment and nothing new happening to O.J., you people seem to be the biggest game in town.”
“I know. I find myself wishing that something awful would happen to somebody else, so I wouldn’t have to watch the media invade Rose’s gift shop anymore. But there you are.”