anyone i had ever known

He cleans out the glovebox and follows Exley. It’s none too sweet seeing him do a double take when he catches sight of Jack, trailing after him on the unpaved path. The box in his arms is laden down; he looks like a man who’s been ignominiously shown the door. Exley looks like a shabby back-room figure, disposing of the evidence, and he must know it because his spine stiffens

Jack clears his throat. “I can carry that for you.”

“Great.” Almost a laugh. “You know I won’t force you to do anything.”

“You forced me to drive all the way out here. How do you know they’ll take you?”

Jack is sick as a dog the whole chartered flight, all the way to another country where none of this will matter. Exley squints at him from under his sunglasses with undisguised disgust and pity.

*

Two white men in a Mexican hotel. Exley signs the register as W.H. White and when Jack sees it on paper he laughs, but it isn’t a joke, just some ingrained appetite for names that start with the same letters. Maybe he isn’t even the real Ed Exley, just a serviceman who fought alongside him on some dirty little rock and who had a little yen for how the name sounded. But that’s stupid.

Behind a locked door, he watches Exley take a fistful of pills, dry. The sharp angle of his neck is something alarming.

“What are you going to do when you run out of those things?” They are in bed together, half-undressed, too exhausted to fuck — beat that. Jack still has his shoes on.

“Oh, I’ll probably switch to heroin.” Exley rolls over onto his side with the hitched grace of a three-legged cat, and plucks a clot of blood from his mouth with a pocket handkerchief. In this light, there are yellow-green bruises blossoming on his face, worse than before.

“That I’d like to see.”

*

Exley locates a Mexican dentist and gets his broken teeth fixed; they come back sharper than before. Jack notices this only when Exley is flat on his back, still bruised, sucking on Jack’s thumb and pointer finger like a sleight-of-hand trick. It’s obscene, it’s juvenile. It’s wet and warm and makes Vincennes’ guts quake with desire.

Ed jerks him off face to face and for an instant Jack can see the two of them in some other scene besides this one — shuttering sideways like a slide in a projector, two men swapping dirty intimacies in two different lives.

Exley never gets tired of asking him questions, really drilling him, like he’s the cop and Vincennes is the criminal. Ed would have made a good cop. He’s merciless, and he won’t be weighed down by excess baggage, except that cardboard box of mysteries. Exley wants to know where he intends to go next, what he intends to do for work, how he intends to stay below the radar with nothing but the money in his wallet and the cheap suit on his back — maybe it’s a good thing Jack wasn’t better-looking, or he’d have a famous face.

*

Some other this time, where the faces are familiar but the sounds are all different, the rhythms are wrong. Exley in a gay bar, where the faggots dance with the bull dykes when the cops show up, where nobody kisses and nobody touches. Class joint. During one of the peaceful times he allows himself to be led — he’s not taller than some of Jack’s dates have been in heels, but the hard line of his arm is an insistent difference. Jack likes dancing, and he’s good at it, but being among the swaying couples on a dance floor full of fairies feels a little like a nightmare, a little unreal, like dancing underwater.

People don’t really come here to dance. They come here to look and be looked at, fuck and be fucked. But on the small pitiful faces of the couples on the floor he sees pleasure, and tenderness. Vincennes cringes away.

He keeps scanning the crowd for familiar faces, mugshots, known offenders — there’s no one he knows here, no one who knows him, no one who’s even heard his name. The two of them swaying, slightly surreal, two bodies tight and close — didn’t he like dancing back in Los Angeles, Exley asks close to Vincennes’ ear like it’s an intimacy and not a reminder of a thick gossipy dossier prepared in advance.

“Not when you keep trying to lead.”

The music is bad. The splintered floorboards burr against the soles of his shoes. And nothing can truly be said to matter here, where the faggots dance with the bull dykes.

*

Exley, as it turns out, is shockingly employable. Vincennes is one of nature’s loafers — stripped of his habits and obligations he doesn’t move in any particular direction. There are jobs to be done, but there’s also the matter of the money, Patchett’s money.

Some more of their little scenes play out against various shabby backdrops, cheap scenes like cheap films — Jack smoking against the pillows with the ashtray on his stomach, Exley putting a cigarette out on Jack’s chest and Jack thanking him for it. When they’re not in bed, they argue about what to do with the money. Because of course they do, Exley’s got a mouth on him when he gets mad and Jack only regrets the things he says any more when he’s locked out on a dirty little street. Jack smokes a cigarette in a broken phone booth, then goes and buys himself a glass of beer, and another. Then he finds a different phone booth, and tries to plead.

*

“When I was fourteen years old a man shot my father in the stomach. He didn’t even make it to the hospital, he died right there in the street. He’d been everything to me. My mother died later.”

In the stew of male influences that mark out Ed Exley’s seedy past — fathers and brothers who died in infancy and scintillatingly corrupt mentor-figures and queer district attorneys — there doesn’t seem like there ought to be room for a mother. There’s no editorial remark about her death, no quip, no commentary.

“They didn’t catch the guy?”

“No, they did not.” They, the LAPD. There are little pink marks on the bridge of his nose from his glasses. He rubs them away with two fingers. “I wondered later if he’d done something to deserve it, if he’d pissed somebody off so badly that he couldn’t live. But if Pierce knew anything, he never told me. There was a file, with photographs. I asked to see it.”

“And they let you?”

“You bet they did. Pierce got it for me. In pictures it didn’t even look like him. I wouldn’t have recognized his face if no one had told me. He looked — loose and unstrung, sort of. Awkward. I don’t know why.”

Jack’s parents are dead. He didn’t take it too hard. Everybody’s parents die. Not seeing much else to do, he kisses him, and feels Exley’s bitten bottom lip twist against his mouth. Jack himself is dead, and it hasn’t set him back too far. Disappeared, presumed dead. Someone else pays rent on his little apartment now, someone else sits at his desk, someone else consults on television shows and pimps out sad kids, bit players. Exley sucks kisses from his mouth and when they break apart Vincennes can taste cigarette smoke coating his throat

*

When the girl meets them on the right side of the border, she looks just like Veronica Lake. Her face is a little longer, the jawline a little smoother, her walk is too careless — Veronica Lake in a dusty checked suit, with sunglasses.

Lynn’s meathead cop boyfriend is long gone — he’s shacked up with some college girl, salvaging her ruin with a pawn shop wedding ring while she finishes up her degree. Exley talks about all three of them — meathead, Latin coed, and Lynn — like they’re a bunch of old friends.

Jack’s gut flares with strange jealousy, seeing the two of them together — still seeing them in photographs, superimposing the genteel traveler and the raunchy naked lady, seeking familiar curves or weird turns or a frisson of sexual energy. But that’s not it at all — it’s like watching a couple of old soldiers bullshitting nervously,

Afterward, Jack says, “I’m sick of hearing about Bud White.”

“Too bad.” Exley shoulders by him and thrusts his hand deep into Jack’s pocket in passing. His fingertips roughly probe the mystery zone of Jack’s upper thigh, making him instinctively stir, and by the time Jack pats his suit all over and shakes off the vague violated feeling, his cigarette lighter’s gone.

*

Later, Ed says against Jack’s mouth, “I fucked Bud White.”

Jack laughs.

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“No, you didn’t, the man’s a gorilla. I don’t give a shit what you did or didn’t do, but you didn’t do that.”

“Couldn’t I have?”

Jack shakes his head. “You didn’t know the guy like I did.”