Read Nowhere for Free Online Page A

bumper was loose at one end. Instead of glass, plastic sheeting covered the driver’s window. This was so dirty and discolored that I could not identify the person at the wheel until he stopped the car and cried out in a voice that seemed to come from the throat of a man with a mortal illness.
    “You Wren?”
    I could not see the speaker, but I confirmed the identification.
    “Climb aboard!” The passenger’s door was flung open. When I had rounded the old station wagon at the rear—the windows of which had been glazed with water-stained cardboard—I saw that the door had been opened so violently, and had been so feebly hinged, that in fact it lay on the runway.
    I leaned down and looked in at the driver.
    He fell across the seat in my direction, hand outthrust in greeting. “Clyde McCoy. Good to see somebody from Home.”
    Of course, he was the man Rasmussen had mentioned.
    I thrust my hand in and shook his. “What should I do about the door?”
    McCoy managed to sit up. He was a skinny, sinewy individual and dressed in a dark-gray suit that I suspected to be properly light gray. His urine-yellow shirt had surely begun life as white. The hue of his tie could be called grease-green. He left the car and staggered around the hood to reach the fallen door. He was one of those persons who owing to slightness of figure and lifelessness of hair could be any age. Using what seemed the strength of sudden madness, he lifted the door and got it back on its hinges. He closed it gingerly. Then he reached through the glassless aperture, found a twisted coat hanger that hung there, and fastened the wire to the upright post of the frame. This took a few moments of intense application in which he breathed in upon me, and when the job was done I felt half drunk.
    When he returned to fit himself in back of the wheel I asked apprehensively, “You wouldn’t want me to drive?”
    He peered at me through lids that were almost closed. “It’s understandable you think I’m under the influence. I suffer from a disease that resembles drunkenness so closely that my breath even seems to smell of alcohol. That’s why I first came to this country. Saint Sebastian had the only doctor in the world at the time who knew how to treat this ailment. You know what he prescribed? Schnapps. Lots of it. You’d notice if I were to take a drink or two now I’d be sober in no time.”
    The vehicle was so old that its starter was mounted on the floor, and after making his statement McCoy began to look for it with the toe of his right foot, which was shod in a battered old shoe from which a section had been cut out, presumably to favor a bunion.
    “I suppose you know that Rasmussen sent me,” I said. “But what you might not know is that I’ve had no preparation for the assignment. I don’t even have any money or a passport. And what language is spoken here? I want to get hold of a dictionary or phrase book.”
    “Don’t worry about anything,” McCoy answered. “I’ll be back to normal in no time.” He had begun to shake, but he finally got the starter’s range and brought the engine into deafening life. The car jerked into motion and sped towards the terminal building.
    It occurred to me to ask: “Don’t I have to go through Immigration and/or Customs?”
    The question fortunately came just in time to halt McCoy’s head in its descent to the steering wheel. He lifted it and said, “Naw.”
    If we had continued on the current course we would have driven directly through the little terminal building. I urged McCoy to turn, which he did abruptly, lifting us on two wheels.
    “But,” I pointed out when the car had regained its equilibrium and left the airport on what was presumably the exit road, an unpaved, rutted lane, “am I not making an illegal entry? If mere rudeness is punished so severely, what about this?” I turned to see whether we would be pursued, but could not, owing to the cardboard in the back windows.
    McCoy frowned.