Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  “What’s your name again?” Kohler asked.

  “Billy,” the salesman said, giving him an odd look.

  He put the dealer’s plate on the back, low down on the bumper, but not right on the car, since it was fiberglass and the magnet wouldn’t hold there. Then the salesman dropped the keys into Kohler’s hand with a salacious touch. Everyone knew what a car like this was all about. The interior was hot from being shut up there in the sunlight, and the leather seat creaked as Kohler got in.

  The engine erupted with a snarl. Oil pressure came up. Alternator started charging. The digital tach throbbed. The salesman got in and put on his seatbelt.

  “Never can be too careful,” he said. “You want to put yours on?”

  “Sure,” said Kohler. “Thanks. It’s funny how a car like this can make sense of things.”

  “Five-speed,” he said. “Reverse is back here.” The salesman looked straight ahead. “Yes, a car like this is a great cathedral.”

  Kohler backed up. The pigeons fluttered into the air. The flags overhead made a little popping sound. The salesman looked both ways at the exit of the lot and turned to Kohler with that pale, uncertain smile.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Good to go.”

  They drove along the strip to the ramp that led up to the highway, and by the top of it Kohler was doing seventy-five miles an hour, but not a steady seventy-five so much as a rising one. All the gauges were LCDs, and so there wasn’t any speedometer needle, just a series of quickly changing and ascending numbers. The car was filled with the grinding sound of the motor that moved the seat as Kohler adjusted it.

  “This section is patrolled pretty heavily,” Billy said. “You know what I’m saying?”

  At this speed the other cars appeared like pylons in an obstacle course, slipping away as Kohler drove around them. Some of them, driven by people who glanced into their rearview mirrors, just got out of the way.

  “What kind of mileage does it get?” said Kohler.

  “Mileage?” Billy licked his lips. “Well, it’s fuel-injected and its got three hundred and eighty-five horsepower.”

  “So, it’s lousy?” said Kohler.

  “No. I wouldn’t say that. It isn’t bad so much as an indication of other things.”

  He looked a little sick, but even so he went on trying to sell a car at close to a hundred miles an hour. Kohler glanced over at him, inspired and yet strangely irritated by the man’s dedication.

  “No,” Billy said. “It’s just a reflection of the horsepower. You could go out and get a Volkswagen and it would get great mileage, but what about pickup?” He swallowed. “All leather interior. Tinted glass.”

  “I was thinking about storage space,” Kohler said.

  “Well, it’s not a truck.”

  “Let’s say you went deer hunting. How do you get a .30-06 in and out?”

  “Through the hatchback,” he said. “This is the exit to take if you want to get back to the dealership.”

  A sign at the side of the road read NEXT EXIT 10 MILES.

  “Do you want to pay cash, or do you want to finance?”

  “Cash,” Kohler said.

  “Oh,” Billy said. “You know something? It’s got a radar detector. Why don’t we just turn it on?”

  He reached down to a switch on the dashboard and turned it on. The thing beeped. Then the pale yellow, green, and red lights flashed, one after another. Up there over a hundred, Kohler noticed that the steering required more concentration. It was exciting to see the cars up ahead move over and then disappear as though something were sucking them backward.

  “Yeah,” Kohler said. “Cash. I was thinking maybe we could do a little something with that price.”

  “Well, make me an offer,” he said.

  “Knock two thousand off.”

  Up ahead there was nothing but the white lines and the median, where the grass had just been mowed. It had been done badly, and the windrows of uncut grass gave the entire thing a striped appearance. At this speed, Kohler had a sudden and unexpected apprehension of freedom, as though you could only feel it at a hundred and ten, which made him suppose it was a dangerous thing to have, but then what freedom doesn’t have a little danger built in? Or a lot?

  “So, what about that price?”

  Billy licked his lips. Looked at the radar detector. Kohler supposed the salesman was trying to make the sale before the radar detector went off. Everything went by in a blur, at least close to the car, but farther away it was just those rounded hills, some houses that looked out of place and awkward in fields that had once been farmed.

  “Okay,” Billy said. “Two thousand.”

  The radar detector made a little squeak.

  “That means you should slow down,” he said.

  “Good, good,” said Kohler. “Glad to see the detector works all right.”

  “I guess you aren’t married,” Billy said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “No married man drives a car that fast,” he said. “And certainly not one with kids.”

  “No, I’m not married,” Kohler said. “I’m almost engaged, though.”

  “Your wife will slow you down,” Billy said. “That’s a promise you can take to the bank.”

  In the office of the dealership they came down to cases, which is to say trying to decide how they were going to find a source for that two thousand dollars. Kohler kept glancing at that black car out there, sitting in its own black shadow, like a piece of dark silk. Billy looked at Kohler’s Chevy, and they worked the deal out so that they split the difference—that is, Billy didn’t give Kohler the entire two thousand, but just one, since he offered Kohler a thousand less than the Chevrolet was worth.

  “Okay,” Kohler said. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  Kohler gave him a check on the account where he had been saving for years now. Billy got out the temporary plate, a cheesy paper one. He put it in the license holder. Kohler signed over the title to his Chevy and Billy dropped the keys to the black car into his hand.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  Kohler idled along, passing the car dealerships with their small plastic flags as though for a nation of a million defeats. Even then he knew right where he was going, as though the place were tugging on him. Maybe, he thought, the car will give me something extra to help confront the place. The memories of it were like recalling a shimmering mass of clouds in the distance, which at first appeared to be a rainstorm, but turned out to be hungry locusts with rainbow-tinted wings. He drove by the house where he had last lived with his mother, and looked in the dim windows. The house had been repainted in a color that looked as if the paint had been bought because it had been on sale, just like when he had lived there. Yellow-green. Then he stopped and got out.

  The small yard in front still had the same bare dirt with a path of cracked and buckled concrete leading to the door, and during the day, the place was still in the shadow of the billboard that was near the interstate. The house was dark, and he guessed it was all right to walk up to the window to look inside. He cupped his hands around his eyes. Inside, he saw the same dim light of his childhood, which had a humming resonance to it, as though the things that had happened here were encoded not in memory so much as in a variety of vibration. Then he saw a television set in the corner that had aluminum foil on the antenna, just as his own had, years before. He recognized this with a shock, as though a familiar face had appeared at the window. But he didn’t jump back in surprise. Instead, he closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool, peeling sash. When he opened his eyes, he saw the reflection of the black car. At least, he knew, he could get away.

  He guessed it was on the strength of this that he got in and started driving straight to the place he had been thinking of in the beginning.

  The bridge had been painted, and now the girders, cross-braces, and rivets were all a municipal green. The bridge had a sidewalk on it that was made of wire mesh, through which you could see the
slick movement of the river down below. The bank had been cleaned up, too. Just that fine sand, marked with parallel ridges where the water had been before receding. No junk in the woods, no trash, no beer cans and bottles, the way it had been years ago. Kohler stopped in the middle of the bridge, and the cars went by with an airy rush and the steel shook beneath the black car, as though even the metal had to vibrate with the impact of what had happened here.

  There was a roll of Tums on the seat, which Kohler had taken out of his pocket, and now he unrolled the silver paper and put a couple into his mouth. He wanted to be precise about what had lifted from that trunk and filled the air, the spirit of the event, the moral haze of it. When he had gotten down there and before he had been dragged away, one of the cops who had taken a look, staggered back. He said, “They cut her up like that? Like that?” And another one said, “To get her in, I guess. What’s that kid doing here?”

  Kohler put another Tums into his mouth and chewed, looking down. Then he glanced at the hood of the car. No chrome. Nothing bright, as if it were absorbing light.

  He felt the impulse to keep moving, but didn’t know where to go. The downtown section was older, not like the strip where the car lots were, but more like a mill town that had experienced an inevitable decline. Now, though, it was being pulled out of this deterioration by coffee shops and sushi bars, dress stores and art galleries, vegetarian restaurants right next to bars for workingmen. On the street, the smell of incense mixed with baking pizza.

  It hadn’t been this way when Kohler lived here. Then it had just been run-down, the stores boarded up, with men leaning against the old brick, drinking beer out of paper bags. The town looked better, but something of the old days still lurked behind the incense and the sushi.

  Kohler went into a diner for a cup of coffee, but there were ten different kinds, and for a while he just looked at the menu that was written in colored chalk on a blackboard. The waitress who came up to him had red hair and a tattoo, a vine with barbed wire, that went around the biceps of one arm. He said, “A cappuccino,” as though he did this every morning. Kohler picked up the local newspaper on the counter and flipped through it, glancing at the articles about political corruption mixed in with reviews of transsexual rock bands. In the back were personal ads.

  He read the kinky ones from people who were “D and D,” which meant drug- and disease-free. Then he turned to the ads from women looking for men.

  “Find something?” the waitress asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the trouble. You never know.”

  “Boy, is that right,” he said.

  “Well, good luck,” she said.

  He finished his coffee, and when he got to the cash register the waitress said, “Are you going to call her?”

  “No,” he said. “I think I’m onto something already.”

  “Good. Good,” she said. “I’ll send positive thoughts your way.”

  In the street he looked at the distant hills that had been worn down by the glacier, and in the afternoon light, so soothing and pink, he stood there, blinking, looking north. He thought, I need gas. An oil change. Maybe a car wash. To bring out that color.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  JACKSONS FALLS IS A MEDIUM-SIZED TOWN THAT sits on a bluff above the Connecticut River. It was a beautiful town a hundred years ago, when the mills were productive and people had money to spend, but all that is left of the flush times is a collection of elegant houses that are now divided into apartments. These buildings have an air of the tattered and weather-worn, like a regimental flag that has been through one battle too many. And below the elegant houses, closer to the river where the mills used to be, there are some brick buildings, functional four-story structures that are streaked around the windows by a hundred years of rain. The streets in front of them always have a chill, even in May, as though winter lingers here and the shadows are impervious to the green-and-pink-tinted spring light. This chill is more spiritual, Russell supposed, than actual. Or maybe another way to put it is that the people in these brick buildings, down by the river, usually had more trouble than they could handle.

  Russell often got partial information, just bits and pieces that were not true, or had been true. He perceived the unknown, in these moments, as having a tactile quality. The air had a slight buzz. It was what he felt when he was working days and got a call about a man in Jacksons Falls who was arguing with a woman in one of those buildings that always seemed to have an air of winter about it. A neighbor had gotten tired of hearing the never-ending arguments and had called the police. The man in the apartment had his girlfriend with him, along with her child. At least that’s what the neighbor said. When the girlfriend tried to leave, the man in the apartment had stopped her. She started crying and this made her baby cry, and to be heard, the man had to yell over both of them. There was a possibility that the man in the apartment, whose name was Sam or Sammy, had a “funny” gun, something from Eastern Europe, or so the neighbor thought. In Jacksons Falls, Russell drove through the short main street, past the movie theater and a couple of abandoned storefronts, and then stopped in front of a building which had that lingering chill. When he opened the front door, it was like walking into a shadow.

  He wasn’t sure why he didn’t like this particular call, and his very uneasiness made him uneasy, which was a spiral that led him around and around until he found himself guessing that what he didn’t like was being inside, confined between walls, which meant that he was already penned up and limited by someone who was about to make a mistake. When he found himself worrying about uncertainty, which was what he was doing now, he shrugged and tried to tell himself that this was always what it was like when he was in the middle of it. Later he could say he had been having doubts. In the middle he just saw that the light was getting brighter, and felt an airy sensation in his chest. Then he wiped his hands on his pants and went into the building. At least he wasn’t alone, since he had seen another cruiser parked in the street, number 602, driven by a friend of his.

  Russell let the door close behind him. The hall downstairs was painted a shiny green, and the light fixture at the end of it, back near the stairwell, left the paint with a silvery film. Even from here, Russell could hear the argument, which was on the third floor. He went to the back of the building and up the marble staircase, veined like blue cheese, and climbed up to the third floor, where Tony Deutsche, the other trooper on this call, was waiting. Deutsche was a heavy-set man with a shaved head. People often thought of him as being slow, but this was because he took his time to think about a question before answering it. In fact, Deutsche was one of the few people Russell would have easily gone to for advice. Russell said, “What’s going on?”

  Deutsche shrugged. “I just got here.”

  The apartment door was about twenty feet from the landing where Russell and Deutsche stood. The sound of the argument was at once staccato and piercing, like a television heard through a wall, and as Russell tried to hear, he couldn’t make out the words, just the irritating cadence. Then Russell and Deutsche went down the hall until they came to the apartment door. The argument was louder here.

  Russell looked around the hall and smelled unwashed clothing mixed with another odor, which he guessed came from someone pissing on the stairs. As he stood with Deutsche next to the door, which was covered with chipped paint, the voices inside the apartment suddenly stopped. For an instant Russell had the sensation that there was someone on the other side of the door, head cocked, listening in the same way he was. He wanted to say that there was something wrong here, but he didn’t know what it was, and since this was so, it was a good idea to say nothing. Still, he kept looking for a detail, a sound, or an object that would explain his sense of uneasiness.

  Deutsche tapped on the door. A man opened it. He was holding an automatic weapon, a short-barreled thing with a pistol grip and a stainless-steel receiver and barrel. From the back of the apartment, the girlfriend said, “Sammy.
Sammy. What are you doing?”

  “You want to know?” said Sammy. “Do you? I’ll show you.”

  He shot the Eastern European machine pistol at the ceiling. It was loud enough to make Russell think that he was being slapped and that the walls, too, were reverberating with a hard smack. Sammy glared at Russell and Deutsche and slammed the door, making more plaster fall out of the ceiling. Upstairs another door was slammed shut and then someone flushed a toilet and Russell heard the water whine in the pipes. The floor of the hall was covered with plaster that had fallen out of the ceiling, and when Russell and Tony retreated to the landing, they left black outlines of footsteps where he and Tony had walked away from the apartment door. The outlines of shoes in the dust looked like diagrams for dancing lessons, that is, if the dance was one that went straight from one place to another.

  “Where’s Peterson?” said Russell.

  “What? I can’t fucking hear,” Deutsche said.

  “Where’s Peterson—you know, the guy who negotiates with these assholes!” said Russell.

  “I don’t know,” said Deutsche. It was hard to say if he had heard or if he was referring to a more general doubt.

  “There’s something about this one I don’t like.”

  “Like what?” said Deutsche.

  “I don’t know,” said Russell.

  “Well, you don’t know and I don’t know,” said Deutsche. “Where does that get us?”

  Russell looked at the hall floor with those shapes of footsteps in the dust, which seemed eerie, as though they had been left by a ghost.

  “Either he’s going to come out of there, or we’re going to have to go in,” said Deutsche.

  “We could wait for Peterson,” said Russell.

  “And let that asshole kill the woman and the kid?” said Deutsche.

  Then they went back to the door. Inside, the girlfriend was crying, and when she wasn’t gasping she kept saying, “This has gotten totally out of control. Totally. Why don’t we get some counseling?” Sammy said, “Some what? Why don’t you practice being quiet? Counseling? Christ. I’ll counsel you. You want counseling. You want it?” From the sound of their voices, they seemed to be in the back bedroom, and the woman’s voice faded more as she tried to soothe the child, and when she couldn’t do anything with the crying baby, Sammy threatened to kill her and the child and anyone else who came near the place, or anyone who was handy. When the woman yelled at him, the words’ were muffled, but the meaning was clear.