Cop House

by Sam Shelstad

  In the kitchen, Eckles sees Patty walking towards him from the dining room with a panicked expression on her face.

  “He’s gone,” she says.

  “Gone where?”

  “Out the front door.”

  Eckles walks into the dining area. Table four, unoccupied. Deserted.

  “Did he pay his bill?” Eckles asks.

  “We can’t let him get away,” Patty says. “He could shoot someone. Kill them. And that’ll be on us.”

  “The woman on the phone told me to stay where I was,” Eckles protests. “She said not to approach Bowman. She said those words specifically.”

  “He’s getting away. We need to see where he goes so we can tell the cops where to find him. You don’t need to approach him. Just give me your keys if you’re gonna be a baby about this.”

  There was no way he was letting Patty drive his car. The woman dropped dishes left and right, spilled coffee on laps. It was her nerves. One time Eckles watched Patty walk right into a wall. She was talking to a customer, head turned around. Thought she was headed for the kitchen and splat. If Eckles lent Patty his car, a crane would be pulling it from the lake within the hour. Besides, she had a point. Bowman might kill someone. They were already involved. He didn’t want to look like a coward so he went.

  Moments later, Eckles is behind the wheel of his Toyota Yaris cursing his staff. Cursing Patty specifically. Patty saw Bowman leave, saw him climb into a white Sierra pickup, saw him drive west on Main Street.

  Eckles drives west on Main. He assumes Bowman is long gone. He hopes so too. The plan is to drive around the neighbourhood for twenty minutes, smoke a cigarette, listen to the radio and gas up the car. Then he’ll head back and tend to the brunch crowd. A few hours of that headache, then home. Have a soak. Watch a documentary on the computer with a glass of wine. Something historical. Try and relax.

  At the next stoplight, however, Eckles sees the white Sierra turning out of the Sunoco across the intersection. The timing’s perfect. The light turns green and Eckles pulls up behind Bowman’s truck as he leaves the station. Great, thinks Eckles. He holds back on the gas to put some distance between the two vehicles. Can’t let this guy know he’s being followed, which means, Eckles realizes, that he’s now following Bowman. He’s doing it. Actively pursuing a dangerous criminal. Tailing a perp. They’re still driving west on Main. Eckles figures Bowman’s headed for the 401. He could be going south to Windsor and then he’ll attempt to cross the border. Or north, up to Toronto, to get lost in the big city. He likely has some hideout, some place inconspicuous out in the country. Could have a band of like-minded goons waiting for him at the hideout. Eckles pictures this—the dusty floors, the card tables, the cellar door leading to an elaborate torture chamber—and knows he’s in over his head. I should have stayed at the diner, like the emergency dispatcher said. Should have stayed in bed. Should have stayed in the womb.

  Eckles reaches for his phone. If he calls the diner he can tell Patty where he is. Get the police on the line. They can use their roof lights, speed through traffic, catch up to him and take over the pursuit. Eckles can go back to work. The Good Morning hasn’t seemed so inviting in years. Except he doesn’t have his phone, Eckles realizes with disgust. It’s in his apron. He hung the apron on the back of the door before leaving. Moron. He has no way of contacting anyone. A complete moron. He’s alone in this.

  Before they make it to the highway, Bowman turns right on Ajax, a country road surrounded by fields and forests. The two cars that had been driving between Bowman and Eckles continue straight—the buffer is gone. Eckles makes the right onto Ajax and now it’s just the two of them. He slows down.

  He’ll continue the pursuit. Follow Bowman until he reaches his hideout or motel or wherever the hell he’s headed for. Then drive to a gas station, coffee shop—anywhere with a phone. Then he’ll call the police, relay the information and drive back to the diner. Receive his shiny medal. Easy.

  Except, he realizes, Bowman just filled his tank. He could be going anywhere. Eckles is running low on fuel—real low. The needle’s past E. If he turns around now he still might not make it back to the diner. And who knows what a lunatic like Bowman has in mind. In fact, maybe he’s spotted Eckles already. Maybe Bowman was headed for the highway, but turned down Ajax to see if Eckles’ Yaris was following him. Which it is. And, by making that turn he’s just confirmed it. Bowman knows. And now they’re alone.

  The two vehicles continue down Ajax. They pass silos, thickets and a small lake. The sky is overcast, depressing. Leaves rot on the ground. There’s no one else on the road. Eckles considers turning around. He can tell the police where Bowman’s headed and say he lost him. Besides, why waste any more time on this? Eckles isn’t going to stop a goddamn bank robber. If anyone’s coming out of this situation on top, it’s Bowman. The man who successfully robbed banks. The man who shot security guards and got away with it. Eckles has never got away with anything. No one put Eckles on the front page of the newspaper—he is a nothing. Maureen knew that. His own wife saw where he was headed in life, realized his limited potential and cut him loose. Smartest decision she ever made. Eckles knows his place.

  Before he can make up his mind, Eckles sees the Sierra slow down. Good God, Eckles thinks. What’s this maniac doing? The white truck pulls over to the side of the road. Eckles checks his rear-view—there’s no one behind him. It’s just Eckles and Bowman. There’s nothing to do but drive on. He speeds up.

  Eckles looks out the passenger window as he drives past Bowman. They meet eyes. Bowman’s face is blank, serious, his hands resting on the steering wheel. “Oh shit,” Eckles says. Once he’s ahead of Bowman, Eckles checks the rear-view. The Sierra is moving again; it’s following him.

  Eckles squeezes the wheel as sweat drips through his knuckles. He belches—his breath smells like ketchup. He stares down the long, empty road. He’s never driven out this way before and he’s not sure where he’s headed exactly. Toward Rodney? Bowman’s Sierra is still behind him, otherwise there’s no traffic. Eckles belches again. His guts feel like a closed fist. The engine sputters. The Yaris is handling all wrong, thirsty for fuel and slowly dying. Soon, the car will roll to a stop. And then he’ll have to deal with Bowman.

  The Sierra keeps its distance. Eckles thought Bowman would run him off the road, but he’s holding back. A few minutes earlier, Eckles made a left turn on Telegraph Road and so did Bowman. There’s nothing on Telegraph Road. Corn fields on one side, pine trees on the other and in Eckles’ rear-view, the white Sierra—so far behind it’s just a dot in the mirror. In a way, it’s worse that Bowman’s hanging back. Like he’s playing a game. Moving all slow and confident. Like a villain. Like a goddamn cartoon.

  The road stretches on as far as Eckles can see. No turns to make, just corn and pine trees. The engine’s coughing and the car’s lurching. He’s not going to make it, Eckles realizes. This is it. He checks the rear-view one last time. White dot in the distance. He presses the gas to the floor, figuring one last burst of speed before the engine quits on him but nothing happens. It’s dead. He’s coasting. Might as well be fleeing the maniacal killer on a skateboard.

  Eckles thinks suddenly of the corn. He can hide in the corn. No time to assess the idea or weigh its merits so Eckles simply acts. He cranks the steering wheel and veers off the road. The car crashes through the chicken wire fence. Eckles hits his head on the driver’s window. There’s a terrible scraping sound from underneath like the car’s being ripped in half. Then the cracking of corn stalks, flattening before him in the windshield. He drifts into the cornfield, speed decreasing with each broken stalk, until the vehicle comes to a complete stop.

  Eckles opens the door, shoving it hard against the corn so he can climb out and immediately starts running. Down the row, husks and leaves smack into his face. Broken stalks scrape his shins. He isn’t sure if Bowman’s in there with him but he dodges to the right, makes his way to another row and keeps running. He’s out of
breath. His briefs ride up into his butt crack. Chest pains. He keeps running.

  Eventually, Eckles can’t take anymore. He’s been hoofing it through walls of heavy corn for ten, twenty minutes—he can’t be sure. He stops. He’s done. His heart pounds in his throat. He puts his hands on his knees, panting, and listens. A bird chirps somewhere. The corn stalks rustle in the wind, otherwise all is quiet. Eckles sits down in the mud and brings his hand to his head where it hurts. Where he hit it against the window coming in to the field. There’s blood on his fingers. Is Bowman in here with me? he wonders. Waiting up ahead. I’ll start walking and he’ll jump out, slit my throat. But then again, why would he bother? Check the imbecile in the Yaris off your list, Bowman! He’s probably miles from here by now. Laughing it up. Organizing his money piles. Another anecdote for his memoirs when he’s finally locked up. Standing around in the yard with the other inmates. Tell that one about the idiot who drove into the cornfield again, Bowman.

  Eckles stands. Wipes the dirt off his jeans. No sign of the bank robber, he walks through the corn. No sense in going back to the car—Bowman could be there waiting, sharpening his dagger on a rock—so he continues down the row, away from the road. Eckles thinks of Maureen. All that corn. She grew up on a farm, he thinks. Not too far from here. There was probably corn throughout her childhood.

  Eckles misses her. Actually misses her—not the usual self-pity. Misses seeing her and talking to her. If he makes it out of the field in one piece, he decides, he’ll track down her number and call her. See how she’s doing. It wasn’t her fault, what happened. Sure, she left. But he practically shoved her out the door. Tried to control everything. The diner was all his idea. The wedding too. They had problems before she took off. Before they got hitched even. Communication problems. Heated arguments. Mutual bitterness. Eckles tried to ignore their issues by throwing nuptials at them, covering everything up with work on the new restaurant. He had a thousand opportunities to mend things with Maureen but he chose to look the other way. He’d always felt that things fixed themselves, given enough time, but they don’t.

  A half hour passed by. Eckles’ feet are sore and his breathing is laboured. He’s thirsty and hungry. And then he steps out of the cornfield, onto the greenest grass he’s ever seen.

  Someone’s yard. A small house a kilometre away. There’s a truck in the driveway; it’s blue. Eckles kicks clumps of mud from his sneakers and makes for the house. A small, old man in bifocals answers the door. He’s wearing a baby blue cardigan and is smiling with his magnified eyes. Eckles smells something sweet and familiar coming from down the hall—waffles?

  “Hello there,” the old man says. “What are we selling today?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” Eckles says. He looks down at his shoes. He feels like he’s in trouble, like he’s about to be disciplined. “I need to use your phone. I crashed my car into your corn.”

  “Oh Lord,” the old man says, reaching for Eckles’ arm. “Are you alright? Come in, come in. You can use the phone. Eileen! Eileen, there’s a man here’s had an accident. Eileen, get in here!”

  Eckles calls nine-one-one again. He’s transferred around from person to person and so ends up telling his story to three different people. When he hangs up, the old man wants to hear what happened too even though he’d sat there staring at him the whole time. So Eckles tells it again. Then Eileen comes into the living room with a basket of homemade apple fritters. The old man tells her the story now. Gets about half of it right. Calls Bowman “Darwin.”

  Eckles wonders what will happen to Bowman. Prison, most likely. Unless he’s gunned down. It was inevitable. A lifestyle like that, your options begin to narrow. An hour ago, Eckles was thinking Bowman was truly free, unencumbered by laws, but the opposite was true. Eckles was free. If anything, there was too many directions he could take. All that freedom was overwhelming.

  “Have another fritter,” Eileen says. “Is someone coming to get you? Would you like some tea? I can put coffee on if you’d rather.”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Eckles says. “A detective is on his way here now. He’ll take me back to town.”

  “I’ll put on some coffee anyway. Maybe the detective wants coffee. I should make more fritters.”

  They’re sitting on wicker chairs. A radio is playing in the kitchen, schmaltzy wartime music. The house smells like fried sugar and fresh laundry. Eckles can’t stop eating the apple fritters. He’s never been so hungry. He licks his fingers. The fritters are the most enjoyable meal he’s had in his life. Eckles doesn’t notice any pain, his headache’s gone. The fear of Bowman is gone. All that is out the window. He’s comfortable. The two old-timers have a calming presence. There’s a painting of a German shepherd on the wall; that’s calming too. The music. The fritters.

  “Can I use your phone again?” Eckles asks.

  “Eileen,” the old man calls to the kitchen, “bring the phone in here.”

  Eckles calls the Good Morning and Patty answers on the first ring. He tells her he’s okay and gives her the basic story as quickly as he can because that’s not the reason he’s calling. Eckles wants to tell her the ideas he has for the diner. A new theme. New menu. He tells Patty to take notes. They’ll rip out the booths and put in wicker tables and chairs. There will be new aprons for the staff. He’ll paint the exterior blue. Eckles stares at the beautiful German shepherd on the wall and wonders what it’ll take for the old man and Eileen to sell it to him.

  Ode to the Library

  You’re wandering the downtown sidewalks looking for a place that’s warm and quiet when you see a pretty girl crossing the street. Where is she off to? you wonder and so you follow. Maybe she knows of a nice spot where you can sit for a while and just as you think this she turns and walks into the library.

  You’ve never been inside the library before and now you have to wonder why not because it’s just the thing: literature, reference books, music, films, newspapers from around the world—thousands of ways to enrich and intoxicate the mind and all for the price of a promise that you’ll bring it all back on time.

  There’s the pretty girl again, emerging from behind a shelf with a book in her hands. You follow her to the other side of the room where she places herself at a table and begins to read; you grab the nearest hardcover and sit where you can watch her. Her attention is rapt—what could she be reading? Who is she? She looks around and catches you staring so you quickly hide behind the pages of your own book, Coping with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. You blush and lay the book flat.

  Half an hour passes. You steal glances at this captivating woman until she eventually gets up—this is your chance—leaving her book on the table. You wander over and pick it up. Doggy Discipline: Better Pet Behaviour in Six Weeks, but this was not what you expected. What a neat surprise and what an important thing for community members to have a space where they can come together and learn about each other in this exciting way. How remarkable it is to hold a book like Doggy Discipline which only seconds earlier was in the hands of a complete stranger. But is she a stranger? You know so much about her already: she’s a library patron, a fellow reader, a pet owner. You sign up for a borrower’s card and take the book home, running your fingers along its spine for the duration of the bus ride.

  Later as you’re sitting down to dinner, you notice the book on the edge of the table. A strange feeling passes through you, as if you’re not alone. The pretty girl from the library is there too, by way of the book you have both held and enjoyed that very day. You lift Doggy Discipline to your nose and a lovely, floral scent wafts from its pages; this is the sweet aroma of your new friend. You caress the individual edges of the paper as you open the book, where her thumbs had turned the pages hours earlier and marvel at the intimacy of the library experience. You plant a kiss on the book’s cover—right on the nose of the golden retriever in the photograph—and know that somewhere a pretty girl is swooning.

  Throughout your meal you speak to
the book as if she were there with you because, in a way she is. You tell her about your daily life as a parking attendant, your dreams of owning your own lot and how all your old friends had moved away years ago—the whole story. She is helpless but to listen. But how one-sided, you think, and so you turn to page thirty-five and extract a reply: “Make sure to use the choke-chain properly, or you may cause damage to your dog’s throat/neck.”

  You bring the book to bed that night thinking you’ll give it a read before drifting off. You lay on your back, letting your eyes fall upon the same words her eyes had studied so carefully in the library. By the time you reach the chapter on making your own punitive apple face-spray, your arms are too tired to hold the book upright any longer and so you lay it on the pillow beside your own. “Good night, pretty girl,” you whisper and fall asleep with your hand between the pages.

  The next day, you take the book to work and cram an extra stool into the attendant’s booth for it to rest on. You prattle on about various things, read random passages from its pages when it’s slow and before you know it, it’s your lunch hour. How quickly a day passes when you don’t have to spend it alone! You skip the food court for today and head to the library instead—maybe you’ll see the pretty girl. The pretty girl is not there and so you return to the library every day that week—sometimes more than once—in the hopes that you’ll run into her again. You bring Doggy Discipline with you each time so she’ll notice you reading it and recognize a kindred spirit but the girl remains absent. The following Saturday morning, however, you see her pass by the library window.

  In a panic, you shove the book into your bag and run outside. You see her crossing the street at the end of the block and are almost flattened by a bus. You catch up and follow the pretty girl—just as you had done the first time you saw her—until you reach a bungalow by the river, just outside downtown. She goes inside while you stand behind a row of bushes to look at her little house. You hear a dog bark relentlessly inside and the occasional hiss of what you assume to be homemade face-spray. It’s windy by the river and you begin to shiver in the cold. You remember the warmth of the library and the wonderful feeling of community you felt the first day you went in. What a simple, lovely thing: how two people, who otherwise might never have met, are able to cross paths amongst the stacks of books; how one of these people, now that the two are connected in this way, might ask the other to borrow a sweater when passing by on a chilly day; how it would be no big deal, should the passerby happen to be a bit shy, for him to simply grab a sweater from the clothesline in the other’s backyard and continue on his way. You walk home in comfort, warmed by the kind offering of the pretty girl.