Lostport

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The first thing Ben did when he got into town was sit in a place called Café Au Lait, warming his red, wind-chapped hands around the largest size coffee they had. After walking on the roadside for forty minutes at his long-legged clip, maybe two and a half miles into the wind, his face was fixed in a Botox grin. His ears were so cold he couldn’t tell if they were freezing or burning.

The second thing he did was buy proper winter clothes at a store called Switzer’s: a down-filled parka, a wool ski hat, gloves, a scarf, fleece-lined boots and what the display called an Irish fisherman’s sweater, a great white woolly thing with a turtleneck that came up over his chin.

Next stop: the bank, where he opened an account with one thousand in cash from Larkin’s sixteen hundred. He found himself eligible for a VISA card with the extremely modest limit of twenty-five hundred. He got a bank card, using his driver’s license and birth certificate as ID. He listed his occupation as transportation coordinator; a fancy name for a former hijacker. Head of pharmaceutical distribution would have worked too.

He found an electronics store where he bought a cellphone with three hundred prepaid minutes, a coffee maker, a small stereo unit with two speakers and a CD player, and a twenty-seven-inch flat screen TV like the one in his hotel.

“I could move you up to a thirty-six-inch for another two hundred,” the salesman told him. Sales kid, really, maybe twenty years old with bad skin and arms too long for his company shirt. Ben stuck with the twenty-seven incher; his living room was so small he’d be sitting close anyway, and he needed to stretch his funds until his bank deposits started.

He told the kid to set his packages aside and went back to Café Au Lait, bought another coffee and called the phone company to get a new land line installed. No need, the woman on the end said, the jacks were already in place. All the company had to do was activate them. He called the cable company and made an appointment for the next day, anytime between nine and two, hours he’d probably be spending at home anyway, cleaning the place up and making it livable.

Ben called Summers, got his voice mail, and left the cell number where he could be reached about wheels. Then he left the café and walked along Main Street, warm enough now in his new clothes but not used to the ungainly bulk of it all. So many years working and living in Tampa, rarely needing anything more than a raincoat. Now he felt like the Michelin tire man, wrapped up in all his layers, waddling along in heavy boots, feeling like if he fell, he’d never get up. He’d be like a turtle on its back, or that monstrous beetle of Kafka’s, waving his useless limbs until emergency crews arrived to hoist him back on his feet.

Walking block by block, the town looked bigger than it had when he and Summers first drove through. Many of the buildings were old and stately, especially the banks and churches, built from limestone or rust-colored sandstone. The biggest building was an old Federal-style courthouse that housed the town hall. Two flags on tall poles stiff in the wind: the Stars and Stripes and the state flag of New York. Next to the town hall was a fire station with two pumpers behind glass garage doors and a newer building, concrete and tinted glass, that housed the municipal police force.

Ben was turning back toward the center of town when the cellphone rang.

“You wanted wheels?” Summers said. “I got you wheels.”

*          *          *

It was a four-wheeled version of the dump he was living in: an utter piece of shit. A white Pontiac Sunbird with a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, every one of them driven hard. More rust than metal around the wheel walls and door frames. Tires bald as stone. When Ben took it for a test drive, the steering wheel shimmied and jerked in his hands as soon as he approached sixty.