The Apartment A Novel(21)

His name, this ex-Army guy, was Early. That’s what he went by. It could have been a last name or a nickname, or it could have been a first name. Early said, I love the Oak Ridge Boys. And he did seem to love them. They made him want to drive fast and say nothing. But what I really love, he said, is playing the Oak Ridge Boys out here, driving this goddamn machine. That’s what I’m going to miss. I’ll be happy to get home. I go abroad for six months, then I’m home for six months and play golf and take the kids to swim practice. I love that shit. You’ve been all over? I asked. All over, he said. Oil in Nigeria, Venezuela. Renewables in China, Ireland, fucking Antarctica once. You believe that shit? Antarctica, I said, holy shit. And obviously the Gulf. And I blast the motherfucking Oak Ridge Boys wherever I go. For a moment I became entirely lost in the beauty and mystery of blasting the Oak Ridge Boys from some massive ATV with a hundred headlights driving at night around the South Pole – a Sno-Cat or a Mars Humvee screwing recklessly into the black force of an Antarctic blizzard. I’m only messing with you, he said. I don’t have kids. And he turned the music down. This is actually on the motherfucking radio, he said, without the accent. Can you believe that? We drove for a little while longer in the quiet discomfort his joke had created. I didn’t know what was the truth, and I guessed he liked it that way. He changed the radio to a classical station and we were listening to strange violin music. He said, the minute he heard it: Alban Berg, fucking genius. Then he told me a story – by way of explaining his sense of humour – about a time, maybe ten years ago, he had put on a hat and some ragged clothes and sunglasses and fake redneck teeth and hopped on a bicycle and rode around his neighbourhood. He called his girlfriend, who was at home, on his cell phone – while he was riding the bike – and said he’d heard on the news that a man fitting his description had raped and murdered some women and was last seen in their neighbourhood. He told her to go to the window and see if the man was there. She saw him – this figure he described, himself, exactly, down to the colour of his shorts – and she became so frightened that she started sobbing and hyperventilating and trying to scream. He told her to calm down and get a gun. Then he knocked on the door and ran away, and she shot the door to pieces with his .357. He smiled after he told me that. That was pretty damn funny, he said. Well, I said, what did your girlfriend say when you told her it was you? How the hell would it still be funny if I told her? he said.

He saw a sign on the road and slowed down to read it. This is us, he said. And we turned right, onto a road that was narrower and more overgrown at its edges. This is the first time you’ve been here? I asked. Yep, he said. He was lying, but I didn’t take the lie as an insult. He thought of himself, I guessed, as a kind of entertainer, a magician of human responses. What he wanted, perhaps, was for me to feel that this place was unscathed by his own memories, and we could experience it for the first time together. He had lied out of politeness, in a way. We stayed on the new road for about five kilometres – I was keeping close watch of the way we travelled, and the distance, in case I had to make it back on my own, in case this whole thing was an epic joke – then turned left onto an even narrower road, hardly wide enough to hold the Range Rover. Then there was a little blue-and-white sign with a P on it, for parking. Nothing else, at that moment, but the sign. Early slowed down and pointed. See it? he asked. I sat up high in my seat. Not really, I said. Okay, he said. He turned into the parking lot. There was nobody else there, not a single car, but there were spaces for five hundred cars and for dozens of tour buses. He parked roughly in the middle of the lot, which gave us an unnecessarily long distance to walk. And he had initially parked outside the lines, so he hopped back in and reparked. He tried a few times, but the Range Rover would not fit inside a space. When he got out he said, This ain’t a fucking Fiat Punto. We walked together across the lot, then straight onto the grass, which was brittle and slippery with frost. I had to walk in short steps. There was a strong smell of silage, and faraway clanking noises that echoed in the limitless distances. Early, who had heavy boots, walked without difficulty. I veered onto a gravel footpath, where the walking was easier. Ahead and below I could see that the earth was depressed, and in that depression I could see little mounds of bricks. Standing just in front of the excavated area was a large wall with a bird’s-eye illustration of the site. I stopped at it, and read some of the information about it in English – there were five or six different languages, including, oddly, Portuguese, unless I don’t know my flags. Anything interesting? Early shouted over. But he didn’t wait for the answer, and I felt it had been less a question than a good-natured reminder that there are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who go see the ruins first, and the ones who read about them first. The site was a Roman military outpost, and the only structures that remained, though ruined, were the walls of a small barracks. The Romans had come here around 5 BC, and these walls were from the century after that. Early – every time I say that name in my memory I see him riding that bicycle, in sunglasses, and wearing those teeth, and I feel both joy and uneasiness – had stepped over the ankle-high wire divider that visitors were not supposed to cross and was standing in the site, spitting tobacco juice. I joined him. No shit, he said, couple of guys like us, over here, standing in this spot. I know very little about Rome, I said. In the Aeneid, said Early, Virgil declares that Rome came out of the ashes of Troy. The half-god Aeneas led his people to Italy. There he defeated Turnus, King of the Rutulians. Early then recited these lines: The giant Turnus, struck, falls to earth; his knees bend under him. All the Rutulians leap up with a groan, and the mountain slopes around re-echo, tall forests, far and near, return that voice. Early spoke this as a kind of country funeral prayer, looking up instead of down. Then he paused and coughed, and spat into his cup. And, well, he said, this is as far as they got in this direction. We looked out, across the plains, at nothing, at wind. I thanked him for bringing me along. You bet, he said. Tomorrow, he said, all this will be a memory. I’ll be on some United flight drinking Scotch and talking to some idiot from Boeing who wants to tell me about efficiency and some conference I ought to attend, because his keynote will be about the very challenges I face every day. I nodded. It was obvious to me that he’d been to that place often. The spot he stood in seemed precise. He did not move from it until we left. I walked around and examined some of the old walls. I got down on my knees and touched them. I put my hands in dirt and grass. Early just stood there, like a man who knew it well enough to just stand there. I never thought it was odd that he’d taken me to that place. Everybody I was meeting – I can’t remember now if I met Early before I met Fritz, but they were not the only ones – was taking me to sacred places.