Page 27 of The Drifter

"Good luck."

"Thank you, sir."

I kept walking. Behind me, I heard the pages start up again before I was through the doors, and I thought, she'll be fine. The ones who worry were always going to pass.

Outside, Charleston was doing something to the air.

Every city has a night smell, and I've cataloged more of them than I could count. Diesel and cold dust, that's West Texas. Baltimore is brine and asphalt. This was different. This was salt and pluff mud and jasmine and old stone that had been holding the day's heat and was letting it back out slow, like a rock by a campfire. There was water in the air without it raining. The air had weight, and the weight was soft. Walking into it was like walking into a room where somebody had just finished cooking.

I picked a direction and went.

That's the whole method. There isn't anything else to it. One foot, then the other one. I don't plan a route, because planning a route makes it a task, and the entire point is that it isn't one. My legs run the machinery and my eyes run the perimeter. Somewhere underneath all that, the sediment starts to settle.

I was aware. I'm always aware. That never shuts off. I stopped wishing it would around the time I understood it was the reason I was still alive.

I clocked the parked cars and the gaps between the streetlights and the man asleep in a doorway on Meeting Street with his shoes set neatly beside him, the way a man sets his shoes when the shoes are most of what he owns. None of it required anything of me. It went in, got weighed, got filed. Awareness is not the enemy of quiet. For me, it's the doorway to it.

Some men sit cross-legged on a mat and count their breathing. I put ground under my feet. Same church. Different pew.

The city wasn't asleep. It was two-something in the morning and pockets of it were wide awake—light and noise spilling out of a bar on East Bay, a knot of tourists on a corner laughing at something on a phone, two kitchen guys in aprons sitting on a curb sharing a cigarette in that boneless way of men just off a double. A carriage horse smell lingered on one block with no horse in sight. Down a side street, a woman sang a piece of something through an open second-floor window, no words I could catch, just the shape of it coming down through the dark.

Festive, but respectful about it. That was the vibe. The town was enjoying itself at a volume that said it intended to be allowed to do this again tomorrow.

It wasn't Texas. Texas at night is a big, dark room with the stars turned all the way up. The towns sit in it like campfires, small and far apart. This place was the opposite of that—close, layered, three hundred years of brick leaning over the sidewalk, alleys that went crooked for reasons nobody alive remembered. In Texas, the land ignores you. Here, the city paid attention. Every street felt watched by its own windows. Most nights, I'd have called that crowded.

Tonight, I liked it.

That surprised me, and I let it. I walked down streets named for dead men and the live oaks came over the top of me like a roof, beards of moss hanging still in the dead air, gas lamps actually burning—actual flame, wobbling in glass boxes on the walls like the city hadn't fully committed to the twentieth century, let alone this one. My boots were loud on the brick and then quiet on the asphalt and then loud again. I crossed a square with a fountain running for nobody.

Mile by mile, the sediment settled. It always does.

There's nothing a long hike can't cure.

My father used to say that.

He'd say it standing in the yard at first light with a canteen in each hand, and seven boys would groan like one animal, because we had horses. That was the insult of it. We had good horses standing right there in the pen, watching us go, and that man would lead us out across that hardpan on foot, hours of it, lechuguilla and dust and the sun coming up mean, all of us grumbling two paces behind him. He'd just walk. He never once turned around to see if we were keeping up. Knowing we were.

I laughed. Because it's a funny thing, what sticks. That man said ten thousand sentences to me before he went, and I couldn't give you fifty of them now. Whole years of him have worn away like a creek bank. But that one line went in like a fence staple. I've spent the better part of my life proving it—one long hike, thirty years wide.

Looking for the cure.

Sometimes, I found it. A long walk clears me the way nothing else on this earth clears me. It takes the noise off. Ninety percent of whatever I'm hauling drops away somewhere around the third mile, every time, reliable as gravity.

But it never touched the last ten percent.

The last ten percent is him.

I made a peace with that a long time ago, or I made a treaty, anyway. The terms are simple. I don't go looking for the ache, and the ache doesn't ambush me in daylight. It keeps to nights like this one. Because on nights like this one, on a strange street in a strange town with the world gone quiet, there's still a boy in me, standing where the caliche meets the blacktop—who believes, in the sealed-off way a jar holds air, that the search never actually ended. That every walk since has secretly been the same walk. And that on the next corner, around the next turn, under the next gas lamp, I might look up, and there he'd be.

Walking toward me. Coming back.

Dad.

It has never happened. It was not going to happen tonight, on a peninsula fifteen hundred miles from the road where I last watched him go.

Tonight, I found I was all right with that.

That was the strange part. I stopped on a corner under a lamp and stood with it a minute, checking it the way you check a healed bone. There was a lightness in me. It had been there since—I ran it backward, honestly, because a man should know his own inventory. Since the diner? Putting those two on the concrete had felt like work done, and work done has a shine to it. Since Cash? Seeing my brother settled like that, seeing whatever it was he'd found—that had moved something, no question.