Jim scratched under the edge of his baseball cap. “What about those Hebrew guys? You said they were sending you a check.”
“I’m not Jewish. My husband was Jewish. Not nekulturny Jew from the shtetl, either, but regular fellow, looked like Russian, very educated, much talent as engineer!”
“Yeah, you said that before. Look, you think I’m some kind of Nazi redneck, or something? This is America, I get along fine with Jews.”
“You are Christian, yes?”
“I’m not anything,” Jim said.
“Television here is full of Christians,” she said. “Talk money, money, money.”
“Hey, I can’t help that,” Jim said. “Man, I hate those suckers!” The talk was livening him up. It was a weird situation, but okay by him, as long as she didn’t take it wrong, and freak out or something. “Look, you don’t really have to do this, Irene. I can drive you back to your place. Just don’t call the cops, though, okay?”
“No. I hate Los Alamos. My husband die there.”
“Holy cow. So you mean it, huh? You really don’t want to go back?”
“I have nothing left,” she said. “Nothing but bad memories.” She smoothed at her hair, nervously. “Why are you so afraid of police, Jim? Do they know you bust washing-places?”
“I don’t do goddamn laundries,” he said. “I do phones, understand? Telephones.”
His confession didn’t seem to alarm her, or even surprise her much. “Many telephones in America,” she said. “You must be rich!”
“I get along,” Jim said.
She looked over her shoulder. “You have big car. And many machines, and tools of boxes. With sleeping bag, too. Like good apartment, many square meters space, Jim!”
Jim felt vaguely pleased. “Yeah, I reckon so. I figure I clear about seventy grand a year … Of course, there’s gas bills, food, motels … I send my dad money sometimes, he’s in a nursing home … Been at it since 1980. I figure close to half a million bucks, so far.”
“You are half-millionaire, then.”
“I didn’t keep it,” Jim said. A steep desert mile rolled under the wheels. It was past five; Highway 30 was lightly cluttered with suburban commuter traffic. “You said you were a lawyer, right, Irene? How come you’re so broke, then?”
“Training in Soviet law is no good in America. Useless!”
“Oh,” Jim said. “Right, I get it.”
She pointed at an Exxon station. “There is telephone. Stop the car, Jim. Bust it for me. I want to see.”
“I don’t break the damn things,” Jim said. “I just open them. I don’t ruin ’em, for Christ’s sake. People need phones.” He checked the gas gauge—it was low, anyway. What the hell. He pulled over by the self-service pumps.
He walked to the station’s office and dropped ten bucks on unleaded. He went back to the van and nozzled up. Irene stepped out; she had wrapped her head in a dime-store scarf from her purse. “Go on,” she said. “Do it.”
“Look,” he told her, “talk’s cheap, right? That stuff I said about phones, that don’t really prove anything. But if you watch me pop that phone, it could make real trouble for you.”
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Can you do it, or not?”
Jim rocked a little on his boot heels, considering. “You’re not scared, huh?”
“You are scared,” she told him. “Because I might inform to police, yes? You have no trust of me.” She waved her hands, lecturing him. “But if I witness crime and don’t inform police, I am accessory. Just as guilty as you. We are both guilty the same, yes?”
“Well, not exactly,” Jim said, “but yeah, that’s the general idea, I guess.”
“So we are both guilty criminal together! Then we are safer that way.”
“Safer from each other, yeah,” Jim said. He liked her attitude. It made good sense to him. “But they still might catch us, y’know.”
“If they catch us, what do they do to us?”
“I dunno,” Jim said, opening the back of the van. “I always figured I could cop a plea. If I show ’em how I do it.”
“Don’t they know this? How you do it?”
“Nope,” Jim said, with quiet pride. “I invented it. I’m the only guy that knows how.” He reached behind the van’s rear wheel well and pulled out a leather carry-case.
“The only one?” Irene said. She peered over his shoulder, on tiptoe.
“Had to work on it for a couple of years. Phones have really advanced locks. Tricky, and tough. Even a sledge and chisel will take you a good half hour. But I had a couple junked phones to work with, in the shop. One day it just came to me, in a flash.”
He zipped open the carry-case, and pulled out his Gadget. He checked the action. Perfect. “Okay, come on.”
They walked together to the phone booth. Jim stepped inside, and opened his trail coat so it swung free around him, hiding the phone.
He lifted the headset and clamped it between his head and shoulder, just for the sake of appearances. Then he crouched a bit, squinted, found the keyhole, and slipped the Gadget into it.
It slid in, bit by bit, on a film of 3-in-1 oil. Jim worked it through, eyes half-closed, feeling for that special click-and-catch. He flipped a lever, and twisted it.
For a second he was afraid he’d blown it—it didn’t work every time, and he was still not quite sure why—but then he had it. The phone’s metal door yawned free, revealing neat gunmetal racks of coins. Jim opened a fresh plastic baggie. He threw a catch. A stream of quarters fell.
The falling cash sounded like junk. Damned Reagan quarters. He’d never seen a word about it in the papers, but the Feds had debased the currency, again. It had been a big deal when Lyndon Johnson first came out with the cheapo clad quarters—nowadays the country was so screwed-up that nobody even cared. Nowadays the quarters sounded like pot metal, with no silvery ring at all, and the dimes were so cheap that you could break them with a pair of pliers.
Jim shut the little door and left the booth. “What a good invention!” Irene said, her eyes wide. “Very clever!”
They headed for the van. “Be glad it wasn’t one of those card phones,” he said. “If AT&T had their way, there’d be nothing but the goddamn cards …” He stuck the gas nozzle back in the self-service pump.
They climbed in, and hit the road again. “Here.” Jim tossed her the bag. “That’s yours, keep it.”
She took the bag, hefted it. “You are a gypsy,” she said. “They act like this, with the rubles … the Gypsies, and Armenians, from the black market. They always throw around the cash. Like water.” She stuck the baggie in her purse.
“Black market,” Jim said. “You hang with that kind of guy, Irene? Back in the USSR?”
“We eat by black market, Jim. Live by black market! Even big people, like daughter of Brezhnev. Boris the Gypsy was her boyfriend, smuggle diamonds, paintings, everything.” Irene seemed to think it was funny. Some kind of Russian black humor, as if she’d slipped to the depths of the gutter—and was glad of it, because at least now she knew where she stood. “I know I would meet Yankee gypsy, some day. American Mafia Gangster!”
“Come on,” Jim said. “I’m a one-man operation. Gypsies and Mafia have, like, whole tribes and families and stuff.”
“I was rob today, and now I am with a gangster,” she said. She snuggled back into the padded seat.
“You sound awful pleased about it.”
“I have finded some truth,” she said. “At last, the real America.”
“This is the desert, Irene.”
“Yes,” she said, gazing out the window.
“New Mexico’s not all desert, y’know. And you should see California. Or Oregon.”
“America feel like a desert, Jim. Because there is nothing to push against. When you don’t have that pushing, Jim … the pressure … it feel like there is nothing at all! You can shout and scream and say anything here, and no one ever informs. It feel like … you have no air. It feel like outer spa
ce.”
“What’s it really like, over there in Russia?” Jim said. “Really all that much different, from here?”
She spoke flatly, dismissively. “It is a hundred times more bad than Americans ever know.”
“I’ve been in Vietnam. I’ve seen stuff.”
“You are innocent childs here. Children. America, to Russia, is like spoiled little boy in nice clothes, facing angry old thief with a club.”
Her voice sounded tight, rehearsed.
“You really hate ’em, huh?”
“They hate you,” she said. “Some day they will crush you, if they can. They hate anything that is free. Anything that is not belonged to them.”
“What about Gorbachev?” Jim said. “The one they signed the treaty with? Folks on TV say he’s different.”
“He can’t be,” she said. “If that was truth, they would never let him be boss.”
“Maybe he surprised ’em. Maybe they were just too dumb to figure ‘im out,” Jim said.
Irene laughed once, sharply.
Jim persisted. “You outsmarted ’em. You got away, right?”
“Yes, we got away. But it’s no good. He’s dead now, my poor husband. He want to fight for freedom, help Americans be free. That is why we go to Los Alamos.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Star Wars,” Irene said. “The Space Shield.”
Jim broke into clogged, nasal laughter. “Don’t tell me you believe in that dumb-ass thing. Christ, Irene, that thing’ll never fly in a million years.”
“Americans went to the Moon! Americans can invent anything.”
An early winter dusk stole over the horizon. Jim flicked on the van’s headlights. “I guess it didn’t work out, though, huh?”
“The Star Wars workers would not trust my husband. They think he must be Marxist, sent to spy here, like Klaus Fuchs. They would not give him any job at all! Nothing! He would have sweep, clean, anything! He was idealist.”
“Then he was in the wrong business,” Jim said. “Star Wars is just a way for the Feds to toss out money, to Bell Labs, and TRW, and General Dynamics, and all that fat-cat, big-cigar crowd.”
“The Russians are afraid of the Space Shield. They know it will make their stupid missiles useless!”
“Look, I was in the U.S. Army,” Jim said. “I repaired that kind of stuff, okay? Helicopters, with goddamn eighty-dollar bolts that any dumb ass could buy for ten cents … it was all a waste! Just a damn waste, throwin’ stuff away, for nothing.”
“America is rich and free!” Irene protested. “Vietnam is prison camp.”
“Yeah? How come they kicked our ass, then?”
“The peasants were brainwashed by Marxist lies.”
Jim dabbed at his nose. “Y’know, Irene, you’re not the easiest gal to get along with that I ever met.”
She smiled thinly. “They say the same to me, in Magnitogorsk. Truth is painful, eh, Jim?”
“Maybe you’d know, if you swallowed some,” he muttered.
She ignored him. Miles passed in silence. Not an angry silence, though, but a kind of easy quiet that seemed almost comfortable.
He was getting into it. He liked having a weird runaway Russian widow in the seat next to him. Something about her seemed to fit into his mood. The whole screwy business was falling together, turning into a little adventure for him, interesting.
He liked her for not chattering once she’d said her piece. He was not much of a talker, himself. It had been a long time since he’d really talked to anybody. The occasional hitchhiker, but hitchhikers were different, lately. No more grinning hippies, who might roll a friendly joint out of their backpacks. Lately, almost every rider he’d picked up had been some poor bastard looking for work, with tired hungry eyes and a sob story as long as your arm.
The world darkened slowly, lost its edges, shrank into a cone of the Chevy’s headlights. Jim began to feel cozy. He liked to drive at night, inside the white funnel of glare. This was where he lived, a static place, where the world rolled on without effort, under the endless monotone thrum of the van’s steel radials.
He liked to drive fast on dark roads. You could never see very far ahead, but somehow there was always more highway. It had always seemed a miracle to Jim that the night’s ribbon of striped blacktop didn’t end suddenly, end in nothing at all, like a tape cassette. But the road had never failed him.
Jim reached out, and jammed a tape at random into the slot of the van’s cassette deck. Sweethearts of the Rodeo. Jim had seen the Sweethearts once, on Country Music Television, at a Ramada Inn in Tucson. They were sisters. A real cute-looking pair of gals.
Over the past months, he’d spun the tape through at least two hundred times. He no longer really heard it, but it wrapped around him as he drove, like smoke.
“You have any jazz?” Irene said.
“Huh? Like what?”
“Like Duke Ellington? Or Dave Brubeck? He is great artist, Dave Brubeck. ‘Take Five.’ ‘Blue Rondo a la Turk.’ ”
“I can listen to about anything,” Jim said. “Don’t happen to have any jazz. Could buy some, though. In El Paso, maybe.”
“These women singing. I cannot understand their words.”
“You’re not supposed to understand it, Irene. You just soak it up.” They were cruising through a flat, dusty little town called Espanola. Neon chili joints and gas stations. Jim found the turnoff to Highway 76 South. “I reckon we’ll have to spend the night in Santa Fe. That okay with you, Irene?”
“Santa Fe is okay,” she said.
“Know any cheap hotels there?”
She shook her head. “I have never go there.”
“Why not?” Jim said. “It’s not far.”
She shrugged. “In my life, I have never travel much. In Soviet Union, internal passport is much trouble. Also, I never own car, so never learn to drive.”
“Can’t drive, huh?” Jim said. He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “You must not get out much … What do you do to pass the time?”
“I read books,” she said. “Solzhenitsyn. Pasternak. Aksyonov. Isaac Babel!”
“Man, that sounds like a real treat,” Jim said.
“I have learned much about Soviet lies we are told all our lifes. Is not easy, to learn such truth. I have to sit and think about the strangeness. Try to make sense of it. I think a long time.”
“Yeah, you kind of have that look,” Jim said. It sounded tragic to him, damn near heartbreaking. Sitting in some cheesy apartment reading books. “You have any friends around here? Relatives?”
She shook her head. “No friends. Do you, Jim?”
Jim shifted a little, uneasily, scrunching back into the seat. “Well, I’m a travelin’ man …”
“You have a lonely face, Jim.”
“Guess I need a shave,” Jim said.
“You have wife, or childs?”
“No. I don’t like being tied down. I like freedom. Getting round, seeing the sights …”
Irene stared out the windshield at the moving cone of headlight glare. “Yes,” she said at last. “Very pretty.”
They stopped to stretch, at a National Forest campground north of Santa Fe. Jim was worried that someone might have told the cops about the shooting, maybe spotted the van. So he popped open a false compartment, built into the back paneling, and had Irene pick out a new license plate.
Irene chose a Colorado plate, which Jim had swiped off a pickup in Boulder. He’d changed the number, of course—turned the eights into zeros, with a ball peen hammer and a metal punch. Where the paint had chipped, he’d replaced it with model-airplane enamel.
All the stolen plates had been altered—he kept about a dozen in stock at all times. He’d gotten pretty good at forging plates over the years, had made a kind of handicraft out of it, actually. Helped to break the tedium.
He zipped the old plate off with a battery-powered screwdriver and buzzed the new one on. He did it in the dark, by feel and habit, while Irene watched sile
ntly, doing lookout duty, hands jammed in her pockets. Jim bent the old plate double, and stuffed it down the side of an over-flowing trash barrel.
A cold night wind was slewing through the pines, off the invisible slopes of the Sangre Mountains. The wind cut through Jim’s clothes and cold-chiseled its way into his infected head. He crawled back into the driver’s seat coughing and dribbling and feeling half-dead.
He stopped at the first likely motel, a Best Western overnighter on the outskirts of Santa Fe. It was a rambling two-story compound just off the highway, with a tall lit road sign and a lot of tarmac.
The clerk inside the office looked reassuringly numb and bored. Jim was low on paper cash, so he decided to use the plastic. It was a false name, with fake California ID, but the Visa people had never caught on. Jim used his dad’s address in the nursing home as a mail drop. He sent the old man cash every month.
Jim signed in, took the brass key on its thick yellow tag. He watched Irene sidle up to the cig machine in the motel’s lobby. She fed quarters in with flat-footed precision, then yanked the handle with the hope-beyond-hope look of a Vegas slot junkie. A cellophaned pack of Marlboros thumped down. Irene plucked it up, and gripped it, and smiled secretly to herself.
Even with a sick raw feeling gripping the tops of his lungs, Jim felt glad to see her enjoyment. It was like giving money to a kid. It made him feel good inside. Too bad he was low on cash. He would have liked to walk right over and slip her a nice crisp fifty.
Back to the van. He drove past scattered Datsuns and Hondas, by pastel room doors under chill yellow pools of light.
He found room 1411 behind an iron stairway. He unlocked it, threw on the lights. Two beds. Good. “Jeez, I’m beat,” Jim said. “You need the bathroom? I’m gonna take a hot bath.”
Irene perched nervously on one of the beds, peeled at her cigarette pack. “What?”
“Are you gonna be okay out here? You can get a Coke or something. We can send out for food.”
She nodded stiffly. “Okay, Jim.” The look on her face told him very clearly that the situation was definitely Not Okay. It hadn’t occurred to her—to either of them—that when she jumped into his van she would end up sleeping with him.
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