He thought about it. Then he said, “You want to know what’s the matter with you? You’re talking to yourself, that’s what’s the matter with you.”

He stopped doing it. Twenty minutes down the road he pulled into a rest area, leaned over the seat back, opened his suitcase, and returned the dog to its position in the passenger seat.

“And away we go,” he said.

In New Mexico he got off the interstate and followed the signs to an Indian pueblo. A plump woman, her hair braided and her face expressionless, sat in a room with pots she had made herself. Keller picked out a little black pot with scalloped edges. She wrapped it carefully for him, using sheets of newspaper, and put the wrapped pot in a brown paper bag, and the paper bag into a plastic bag. Keller tucked the whole thing away in his suitcase and got back behind the wheel.

“Don’t ask,” he told the dog.

Just over the Colorado state line it started to rain. He drove through the rain for ten or twenty miles before he remembered the guy on NPR. He tapped the brake, which made the cruise control cut out, but just to make sure he used the switch, too.

“Close one,” he told the dog.

In Kansas he took a state road north and visited a roadside attraction, a house that had once been a hideout of the Dalton boys. They were outlaws, he knew, contemporaries of Jesse James and the Youngers. The place was tricked out as a minimuseum, with memorabilia and news clippings, and there was an underground passage leading from the house to the barn in back, so that the brothers, when surprised by the law, could hurry through the tunnel and escape that way. He’d have liked to see the passage, but it was sealed off.

“Still,” he told the woman attendant, “it’s nice to know it’s there.”

If he was interested in the Daltons, she told him, there was another museum at the other end of the state. At Coffeyville, she said, where as he probably knew most of the Daltons were killed, trying to rob two banks in one day. He had in fact known that, but only because he’d just read it on the information card for one of the exhibits.

He stopped at a gas station, bought a state map, and figured out the route to Coffeyville. Halfway there he stopped for the night at a Red Roof Inn, had a pizza delivered, and ate it in front of the television set. He ran the cable channels until he found a western that looked promising, and damned if it didn’t turn out to be about the Dalton boys. Not just the Daltons -Frank and Jesse James were in it, too, and Cole Younger and his brothers.

They seemed like real nice fellows, too, the kind of guys you wouldn’t mind hanging out with. Not a sadist or pyromaniac in the lot, as far as he could tell. And did you think Jesse James wet the bed? Like hell he did.

In the morning he drove on to Coffeyville and paid the admission charge and took his time studying the exhibits. It was a pretty bold act, robbing two banks at once, but it might not have been the smartest move in the history of American crime. The local citizens were just waiting for them, and they riddled the brothers with bullets. Most of them were dead by the time the shooting stopped, or died of their wounds before long.

Emmett Dalton wound up with something like a dozen bullets in him, and went off to prison. But the story didn’t end there. He recovered, and eventually got released, and wound up in Los Angeles, where he wrote films for the young motion picture industry and made a small fortune in real estate.

Keller spent a long time taking that in, and it gave him a lot to think about.

Most of the time he was quiet, but now and then he talked to the dog.

“Take soldiers,” he said, on a stretch of I-80 east of Des Moines. “They get drafted into the army, they go through basic training, and before you know it they’re aiming at other soldiers and pulling the trigger. Maybe they have to force themselves the first couple of times, and maybe they have bad dreams early on, but then they get used to it, and before you know it they sort of enjoy it. It’s not a sex thing, they don’t get that kind of a thrill out of it, but it’s sort of like hunting. Except you just pull the trigger and leave it at that. You don’t have to track wounded soldiers to make sure they don’t suffer. You don’t have to dress your kill and pack it back to camp. You just pull the trigger and get on with your life.

“And these are ordinary kids,” he went on. “Eighteen-year-old boys, drafted fresh out of high school. Or I guess it’s volunteers now, they don’t draft them anymore, but it amounts to the same thing. They’re just ordinary American boys. They didn’t grow up torturing animals or starting fires. Or wetting the bed.

“You know something? I still don’t see what wetting the bed has to do with it.”

Coming into New York on the George Washington Bridge, he said, “Well, they’re not there.”

The towers, he meant. And of course they weren’t there, they were gone, and he knew that. He’d been down to the site enough times to know it wasn’t trick photography, that the twin towers were in fact gone. But somehow he’d half expected to see them, half expected the whole thing to turn out to have been a dream. You couldn’t make part of the skyline disappear, for God’s sake.

He drove to the Hertz place, returned the car. He was walking away from the office with his suitcase in hand when an attendant rushed up, brandishing the little stuffed dog. “You forgot somethin’,” the man said, smiling broadly.

“Oh, right,” Keller said. “You got any kids?”

“Me?”

“Give it to your kid,” Keller told him. “Or some other kid.”

“You don’t want him?”

He shook his head, kept walking. When he got home he showered and shaved and looked out the window. His window faced east, not south, and had never afforded a view of the towers, so it was the same as it had always been. And that’s why he’d looked, to assure himself that everything was still there, that nothing had been taken away.

It looked okay to him. He picked up the phone and called Dot.

18

She was waiting for him on the porch, with the usual pitcher of iced tea. “You had me going,” she said. “You didn’t call and you didn’t call and you didn’t call. It took you the better part of a month to get home. What did you do, walk?”

“I didn’t leave right away,” he said. “I’d paid for two weeks.”

“And you wanted to make sure you got your money’s worth.”

“I thought it’d be suspicious, leaving early. ‘Oh, I remember that guy, he left four days early, right after Mr. Egmont died.’”

“And you thought it’d be safer to hang around the scene of a homicide?”

“Except it wasn’t a homicide,” he said. “The man came home after an afternoon at the golf course, locked his door, set the burglar alarm, got undressed, and drew a hot bath. He got into the tub and lost consciousness and drowned.”

“Most accidents happen in the home,” Dot said. “Isn’t that what they say? What did he do, hit his head?”

“He may have smacked it on the tile on the way down, after he lost his balance. Or maybe he had a little stroke. Hard to say.”

“You undressed him and everything?”

He nodded. “Put him in the tub. He came to in the water, but I picked up his feet and held them in the air, and his head went under, and, well, that was that.”

“Water in the lungs.”

“Right.”

“Death by drowning.”

He nodded.

“You okay, Keller?”

“Me? Sure, I’m fine. Anyway, I figured I’d wait the four days, leave when my time was up.”

“Just like Egmont.”

“Huh?”

“He left when his time was up,” she said. “Still, how long does it take to drive home from Phoenix? Four, five days?”

“I got sidetracked,” he said, and told her about the Dalton Boys.

“Two museums,” she said. “Most people have never been to one Dalton Boys museum, and you’ve been to two.”