The Travel Writer Read Free

highways and poisoning smokestacks or a contemptible suburban archipelago of strip malls and office parks. But the town Hilary’s parents lived in was too far from the city to have succumbed to either strain of New Jersey disease. It was important enough to warrant a roofed concrete platform by the rails but not enough for a station that sold tickets. The road beyond the platform had only two lanes, and the line between them was a faint sepia shadow. Across the road was a chain convenience store, standing alone beside a patch of parking lot. In principle I approve of such charming locales, but in practice, like any good New Yorker, I despise them as pitiable runt towns. Their lack of pedestrians, all-night delis, public transportation, and suspicious glares disorients and disturbs me. When I asked in the convenience store about a taxi, the counterman’s head jerked back like a shooting victim’s.
    “Taxi?” His eyes darted about the counter in front of him, as if he hoped to find the concept’s definition taped somewhere beside the cigarette prices.
    My only recourse was to call the Pearsons from the train platform, like a freshman home from college. I had arranged the interview with Mrs. Pearson, but her husband was also evidently expecting my arrival, and not with pleasure. He informed me that the house was about a mile and a half up the road from the train station, and then asked if I were sick or crippled.
    Reporters love eccentric assholes, I reminded myself. The black strip of asphalt, a scar climbing up the back of the wooded hill ahead, rose with a daunting steepness, and my view of the hill’s peak was smeared with heat, but at least I would have the road to myself. Wind made the leaves beside me shiver and whisper.
    As I hauled myself up the hill, I drafted a mental sketch of my upcoming raid on Mr. Pearson’s information. He would start off gruff and dismissive, until my piercing questions prodded his brain into hitherto undiscovered territory. At last his brow would wrinkle in bewilderment as he suddenly remembered, and slowly, as if hypnotized, he would confide in me the one little tip he had neglected to mention to all the other investigators and reporters. “Now that I think of it, that postcard she sent us was a little odd in one small way.… ” Afterward I would help him realize the implication of this discovery, and he would collapse to his knees, his mind stunned and inoperative. On the flight to South America, my mind would burn with a lead no one else had. Pilar’s eyes would glow when I told her.
    I couldn’t imagine what questions I could ask to produce such a result. I had never interviewed anyone but tourists, PR agents, and hotel and restaurant managers before.
    * * *
    Hilary’s father was stooped and hulking; he swayed when he stepped, like a circus bear walking upright, and his breaths were growls. His neck, ears, and cheeks were red as raw steak; the rest of his face was only slightly better done. He narrowed his eyes when he looked at me, as if I were too tiny to see clearly.
    I followed him into his cavernous living room, where pictures of the same female in various stages of youth jostled each other for position on the mantel. Mr. Pearson flung his swollen hands at a leather sofa in sullen invitation, and with a slow cranking of winches, lowered himself into a matching leather La-Z-Boy. He stared straight ahead at the blank screen of what must have been a fifty-inch television, clearly out of old habit.
    “I’m going to the Matamoros,” I began.
    “Burn it down for me,” the man said. “And shoot every one of those liars that run it!” Blood seemed about to burst from his pores.
    His wife entered the room. I expected a skinny Edith to his Archie Bunker, and indeed she was slender and her skirt was brown and grim, but as she leveled her stare at her husband, he shut his mouth and seemed to nestle deeper in the Lay-Z-Boy’s leather cushions. Her hair shot back from her brow