Cross Country Murder Song

by Cross Country Murder Song (retail) (epub)

  The policeman had a cut from shaving just underneath his chin that he worried absently with his right hand.

  We don’t know who he was, the policeman said. He fired on us and then he started firing on the cars that were passing us so they’d crash into us, we think, that they’d pile up and cause a commotion . . .

  Did he get away?

  The policeman shrugged helplessly.

  He imagined Lulu in her green Impala slowing down as the traffic built up before her and the police lights flashed red and blue in the anaemic Californian sky. He could see the policeman waving the traffic down, slowing the snaking cars as they pulled their suspect to the ground. People were rubbernecking, gawking as the man disappeared beneath a brace of police bodies like prey being pulled down by a pack of lions. The cop waving down traffic swatted suddenly at his shoulder as if he’d been stung and then thrown violently to one side as the blood bloomed through his shirt and his eyes got wide. Then Lulu in her car hearing the sound of the bullets, high and whining as car windows started to shatter and the policemen fell to the floor, their legs kicking out like dogs dreaming, screams and orders being shouted at the same time, someone shunting into her as her car engine roared and then whined and then more bullets thudding noisily into the bodywork, the paint popping off in thick silver and green buttons. A bullet crashing through her window and she felt foolish for jumping as the window cracked and then the next shot hitting her in the neck and her car swerving into the nearest police car, setting off its siren in a lazy, droning wail. More shots ringing out and then there was just the sound of panic and terror filling the air. Some cars sliding almost lazily into the back of those already piled up, adding to the broken jigsaw of vehicles that were spread unevenly across the highway. Then the noise subsiding and smoke spreading through the air and towards the distant hills, leaving only the wailing of urgent sirens distilling the slowly undulating Californian air.

  The policeman sat silently across from him, a notepad set on his knee. He fished a card out of his top pocket and handed it across to him, it had a number and his name printed on it in bold black ink. He let himself out as his neighbour let himself back in and stood gingerly over him.

  Lulu, he said and let himself be held as emptiness rushed through him and took the strength in his arms and legs away and made him momentarily blind.

  There was a photo of her coffin being carried to the grave in the papers, the dead policeman too, his was wrapped in an American flag, they’d been buried miles apart but it had been on the same warm afternoon. Guns saluted his descent into the earth, dirt peppering the lid of the casket sounded hers. Charlie and his girlfriend were there, his neighbours, Lulu’s stepmother too and in the distance someone shooting at them but this time with a camera. He went to counselling after Charlie had stayed as long as he could. He couldn’t believe that he had to go on alone, that she wouldn’t be in the next room when he entered it, he sat up late at night with a blunt-looking revolver before him on the nest of tables, other nights he nursed a bottle of unopened whisky as boxes of painkillers sat strewn on the shelf next to framed portraits of her passing through her unimaginably short life. They were props though; he was magnifying his situation, trying to create a scenario he imagined a widower might need to go through. His pain was real but it was so all-encompassing and unwieldy that he had no idea how to deal with it. He had a very real ache in his shoulders and neck for months that a psychologist insisted was imagined and a symptom of his grief and anguish, but regardless of the diagnosis he’d still wake each day by sitting up and wincing as the pain rattled through him like old coins in a tin can.

  He started online dating at a friend’s insistence, but balked at the idea of going out and meeting other people, he’d barely left the house for weeks as it was, only yielding to the pleas of his neighbour to at least take a walk when the weather became unbearably hot and even the full icy impact of his air conditioning couldn’t disguise the welcome of the glimmering world outside. If he didn’t enjoy the actual idea of dating he did begin to welcome the attention of the people he met on the internet. It would start with emails and in one or two cases instant messaging conversations that went on late into the night. It reminded him of Lulu and the evenings they’d sit together and listen to mixes of music that they’d made each other. They’d applaud the other, sometimes playfully, or coo over a choice the other had made that had significant relevance for them both. He found the Women in Prison website late one night when he couldn’t sleep and at first presumed it was porn, but was touched by the testimonials from the inmates on the site looking for someone to write to. Then one morning when the day’s new light had brought him around in the same chair again he decided to dedicate himself to a new wife, to blot out the past as much as he could. He couldn’t kill himself and he couldn’t go on so instead he chose an indifferent middle where he could idle, and for that he’d need someone he neither loved nor hated, but would be around as long as he needed and act as a buffer between him and the wounded, desperate world he now found himself in. That was when he found Russian Brides and Sylvia. Charlie objected, worried that his father’s grief had driven him mad, and no matter how many times he explained it to his son, he couldn’t believe this temporary state, this sticking plaster, could be what his father truly wanted.

  It isn’t, he told Charlie, but it’s all there is.

  He went to the airport to meet Sylvia and her mother who’d be living with them for the first month until her daughter settled in to her new surroundings. He studied the Arrivals board and saw that their plane had landed early and as he stood in the main hall he saw them and their trolley piled high with suitcases before they saw him. He stepped back into an alcove and out of sight as they came closer, offered up a silent prayer to Lulu, tried to rub the redness out of his eyes and then he sprang forward, arms held wide and smiling as his new wife quickened her pace to meet him across the polished white floor.

  Chorus

  His father had caught him with one of his magazines when he was thirteen. He’d been staring at it transfixed in his room, but privacy wasn’t an issue to his father.

  My house, he used to say going through every door like it was a challenge.

  What the fuck is this? his dad demanded, snatching the issue of Girls, Girls, Girls from his hands and holding it up to the light as if the transparency of the page might give something away, like the watermark on a dollar bill did. His father held his pose for a moment and then his eyes focused in on something on the page. He touched the spot on the page gently with his finger and then withdrew it slowly.

  Cute, he said. Where did you get this? There was a pause and then his father spoke again. One of mine, yeah? He sat down next to him on his bed without waiting for an answer.

  I’d have shown you this stuff if you said you wanted to see it, he said, but don’t go sneaking around in my things, you never know what you might find. He stood up and then paused at the door. Don’t tell your mother, he said and threw the magazine at him, causing it to bounce off his chest and spill out across the floor.

  Hands! shouted his father as he retreated down the hall, you took your eye off it, hands!

  Every time the driver turned the police radio on there was one emergency after another being dispatched. When he listened more closely, ignoring the constant calls coming over the air for him, he realised it was just one emergency: the pile-up on the highway, his pile-up on the highway. They were talking about the shooting and its aftermath. He was staying off the main roads momentarily, but he could still hear the constant whirr of helicopters passing overhead, racing back towards the vehicles and bodies he’d left strewn across three lanes. Ambulance and police sirens wailed in the distance and he wondered how many were dead. He was sure he’d done for a handful of drivers and their passengers, but he wasn’t so sure about how many policemen he’d killed. Not even the first one he’d got in the shoulder. It was a very powerful rifle, though; he imagined the impact would have caused massive trau
ma and damage, surely enough to kill him. He thought about the bullet zigzagging through the policeman’s body, ricocheting from bone to bone before exiting in a cloud of red smoke. He was, however, disappointed to note that the shot hadn’t even knocked his sunglasses off his stupid fucking head. The police got out of the way pretty quickly, he thought, leaving all those people, all those taxpayers, out there unprotected in their cars. To serve and protect, he thought, to serve and fucking protect.

  After that first morning, his father started leaving magazines for him to look at. He’d come in from school and find one had been pushed under his bedroom door or thrown on his bed. He felt excited and dismayed, thrilled to be getting the magazines, but wounded that his father was the one providing them. The initial elation tempered by guilt and the thought that his father might have leafed through them first. He kept thinking about the way his father’s face had changed when he had been holding the centrefold up to the window, the concentration on his face. He kept them though. He’d soon filled a shoebox that he kept at the back of his cupboard covered in spare bedding. Intermittently, battered magazines would circulate around school and then disappear again just as abruptly and while friends mourned the limited material available, he was cultivating his own private collection.

  He was sitting in the kitchen looking out at the garden when his father came in.

  How you doing? his dad asked him. You like that stuff I gave you? It doing it for you? he said, opening the fridge door and looking inside.

  He could barely bring himself to speak to his father about it, it’s okay, he said, you know.

  It’s okay, his father boomed. Hey, if that’s good enough for me and my guys then what do you need to worry about. Hey, he smiled, you ain’t kinky, he paused for effect, or queer?

  The boy started to remonstrate, panicking, his cheeks flushed and hot, but his father was laughing, he slammed the fridge door shut and walked over to him with slices of ham folded up in his fingers, he rolled them up and mimed smoking the greasy tube with a smile, swallowed it in one gulp and then he patted his son good naturedly on the knee.

  Listen, he said, when that stuff comes in, I grab a copy for you and one for me. I’m sure we both get a kick out of it. I was a kid once, I know how it goes.

  He blushed furiously as his father spoke, staring determinedly out of the window.

  Now keep it down. Here’s your mother, his father said. And as his mother entered the kitchen his father stood and told her he was making coffee and then asked if she’d like some.

  He had just turned fourteen when his father asked him if he wanted to see where he worked some nights.

  Sure, he said, rising quickly from his bed. It was Friday night and papers and books covered the blankets. His father stopped him with a hand on his chest.

  That your homework? he asked.

  It’s done, he said, I swear. His dad raised his hand as if he might strike him and then dropped it slowly with a smile. You’d better, he said, or she’ll have my balls.

  Ma won’t mind, he started to say, but his father placed a finger at his lips. Shush, he said, let’s go get the car.

  The strip club sat under the highway. It looked like it might have fallen from the sky, its neon façade blinking in the darkness. It was still, the only sound coming from the cars rushing by overhead, though its parking lot looked busy, down the street he could just make out the lights coming from another bar, hear the faint sound of music when the door swung open, and then it looked like wasteland beyond, the kind of place you’d go to dump unwanted furniture or family pets.

  You come here? he asked his father as they exited the car, unable to hide the surprise in his voice. He knew he led an unconventional life, but when he thought of his father at work he was seated in a corner office high in the air, the city a grid of streets far below.

  His father looked at him squarely. What do you think pays for your fancy school? he said. Then he laughed. One day this will all be yours, he said, gesturing dramatically, and pushed him towards the entrance with a fist at the small of his back. His father looked immaculate in a pressed black suit and tie, his hair glistening and kept in place with a sheen of oil. As they pushed through the tables to the bar a man stopped his father and looking him up and down asked him whose funeral he was going to. Yours, his father said without missing a beat, you got a problem with that? and then they both fell against each other laughing.

  You met my kid? his father asked the man and he didn’t hear the reply, but the man smiled and shook his hand vigorously. He was slapped on the back a lot after that and even though his father insisted he drink soda, strangers kept buying him beers and he stood at one end of the bar and drank some of them. His father came and stood next to him and brought him a stool.

  Sit there, kid, he said. You enjoying the show? He said he was and they both looked towards the girls dancing up on the small stage across from the bar. They watched, heads nodding softly in time with the music and then he noticed the girl looking across the bar at his father and then at him. She waved and his father waved back and as she moved through the tables towards them he hurried forward to meet her halfway and then he took her by the elbow and turned her around and they navigated their way towards the door next to the stage that led through to the back. His father’s head was very close to hers as if he were whispering something in her ear and when the light picked them out as a silhouette the driver thought they looked very much like the Siamese twins he’d seen in his schoolbook.

  The girls were naked or very nearly, you never had to wait long and when the first one tore her thong off and whirled it around her head he’d felt himself turn red and had to quickly duck down behind his beer, cooling his cheeks against the cold glass. He was sure his father’s friends had noticed or guessed at his discomfort and their laughter was aimed at him, but when he caught the attention of the man who had first shaken his hand, he simply toasted him with his drink and then indicated the girls onstage with a nod and winked. He mouthed, you okay? at him and when he motioned that he was, the man touched the barman on the elbow and sent another drink across.

  His father was back at his side when the girl the boy had seen across the bar appeared on stage. On her head was a cowboy hat that kept catching the light in broad flashes. As she danced she used it to collect bills from the crowd of men gathered at the front of the stage, inverting it with a shimmy and a smile as it filled up with dollars. His father’s friends cheered lustily when she appeared and when he looked at his dad he just grinned and placed a hand on his shoulder. His father had one of his men drive him home that night and when he got back the house was dark and it looked deserted. He lay in bed as the room swirled around him and thought about the girl in the cowboy hat and how he couldn’t wait to go back there again.

  The driver sat at the side of the road with one door open, his legs propped up on the kerb, he was smoking a cigarette and enjoying the way the sun felt on the back of his neck. He’d put the patrol car’s lights on, setting them to a considered revolve, enjoying the dappling light they gave off. He listened to the cars slow as they passed, the oncoming drivers spotting his car and sensing an emergency, then killing their speed accordingly. He stayed out of sight, sat low on the seat and flicked cigarette butts into the field beyond. He wondered where his father was, but didn’t think he was coming back anytime soon. He’d disappeared over Christmas one year, suddenly gone from their lives a few days before. He’d been all over the papers, he remembered the detectives at their door, the uniformed men marching through their living room, someone shouting that they had a warrant and that everyone needed to stand back. They went through everything including his presents that sat wrapped under the tree.

  Sorry kid, said one officer as he tore at the paper only to find a board game.

  Bet you feel fucking clever now, he said to the cop, trying to use his father’s voice, but he was intimidated by all the police in his home and was glad when his mother pulled him back behind her and told h
im to be quiet. They turned everything over and found nothing and spoke quietly and intently to his mother in the kitchen until the family lawyer pulled up sharply in the driveway and came tearing through the house, his coat making an exaggerated shape behind him. He held his briefcase up high as if to ward off evil.

  Excuse me, officer, he said to the detective talking to his mother. My client, he snapped and led her back into the living room and stood silently next to her like a sentinel, his eyes trained on the policemen working methodically through room after room.

  It’s Christmas, he said at one point and picked up the opened presents. Not the kid’s stuff too. Don’t you people have families? he asked, but he was calm when he said it. You’d better find something, he said and one of the detectives turned to look at him.

  We will, he said and rankled as the lawyer made a snorting sound. They didn’t though. His father appeared at his bedroom door one night in the listless week between Christmas and New Year.

  Miss your old man? he asked, the familiar grin playing on his lips. Come downstairs and say hello to the guys.

  Where were you? he asked.

  You know better than not to ask that, his father said. Anyway, I was around, I was watching over you. Sorry I missed Christmas, kid.

  That’s okay, he said as they descended the stairs and he leant into his father feeling the arm around him, savouring the cigar smoke held in the weave of his clothes. The kitchen was filled with his friends and as they entered the bubble of conversation burst into exaggerated life.

  Look who’s here, someone said and glasses clinked and chairs were pulled up and he was invited to sit. His mother stood at the window and he smiled at her and waited for her to smile back.

  The driver was back behind the wheel of the patrol car, engine idling as he debated staying on the quieter side roads or heading back onto the highway. There was a junction not too far ahead that offered him the option. He lowered his window and listened to the voice on the radio demanding again that he respond with his location. He turned it up, enjoying the dismay and anger as it filled the car and then he pulled out and raced towards the fork in the road up ahead.