Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  Deutsche and Russell got the man to crack open the door so they could talk to him. Everything is O.K., it’s all a misunderstanding. Everyone is reasonable. Nothing has to go wrong. Deutsche had a nice, calm voice, but the more calm and reasonable he was, the more Sammy got excited. Russell guessed this was because Sammy had been hearing calm, solicitous voices telling him things he didn’t want to hear all his life. Russell asked if there was any alcohol in the apartment or drugs or anything like that, and when he asked, he did so with simple, ordinary words, just trying to find a common language that he and the man shared. The man looked at Russell with a blank, flat expression that showed no awareness of where he was or what he was doing, at once so scared and disoriented that there was no way to reach him.

  The kid started crying again. The girlfriend sounded as though she was getting worn down, too, and that she didn’t have the strength just to sit there, to be quiet and let things play out. Instead, she got more and more vocal and this made Sammy say, “Will you shut the fuck up? What do I have to do to shut you up? Is that what you want? You want me to shut you up?” Her kid started to scream, and this did to her what her screaming did to Sammy. She told him that he was terrifying her child.

  “Are you saying that the crying baby is my fault?” he said.

  “The baby is scared,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Well, it better get over it.”

  Deutsche began to shout, too, but Russell reached over and took his arm and pulled him back down the hall. He didn’t want it to come to the point where they were all screaming, the voices rising higher and higher until everyone went right over the top. Russell sat down on the top step, eyes closed, concentrating. Then Deutsche said to him, “What do you think?”

  “This is getting out of control!” the woman screamed. “Why can’t you just stop?”

  “The guy just keeps going up and up. Like a hot-air balloon,” said Deutsche.

  From inside the apartment the voices started again, just as if they were having an argument on a Saturday night, loud, insistent, almost funny. Almost. The man in there shot the machine pistol again, and the woman screamed, “What is wrong with you? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “You want to see?” Sammy said. He said it over and over again, “You want to see? You want to fucking see?” The exasperation behind this question got bigger and filled the room and the hall, too, with Sammy’s disappointments, his anger, his failings, his confusion. Russell disliked the confusion more than anything else, since it allowed Sammy to think he was someone to clear matters up, but in fact he was only digging a deeper hole.

  The kid went on screaming in a repetitive two-tone shriek that had a grating edge to it.

  “All right,” said Russell.

  “All right, what?” said Deutsche.

  “You know,” said Russell. He gestured to the door.

  They moved through the dust from the ceiling, which they could smell, almost like wet plaster. Tony tapped on the door.

  “Open up for a minute,” he said.

  The man opened the door, but he had the chain on it. The kid’s crying was instantly louder. Sammy’s face looked as if he had a bad fever. Everything about his appearance, the unshaved sweatiness, the tired and yet manic look in his eyes, showed that the way he handled being afraid was to be stupid. He was mesmerized by the power of stupidity, by the scale of the mess it makes, but messy or not, it was what he had. He was sweating there, his face looking slick and damp, and while he was trying to swagger and to convince everyone to do exactly what he wanted, he also showed that he wasn’t in control of anything.

  The light in the hall changed, or so it seemed to Russell. It became brighter and darker at the same time. The places where the light fell seemed so clear, so illuminated as to look silver, but the shadows were even darker, more obscuring, and tainted, too, with that cloying odor of urine.

  Inside the apartment, Sammy shouted over his shoulder at his girlfriend, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you?” And she screamed back, “What, what did you tell me?” Their voices went up and up, their exhaustion and disorientation leaving them incapable of seeing anything outside of the small space, surrounded by opaque walls, where they stood. This was it, they seemed to be saying. This was what they had always been waiting for, and now it was here. “That fucking kid,” said the man. “That fucking kid. You can’t even shut it up. Shut it up.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “It’s a baby. Babies cry. Don’t you know that? Do I have to tell you?”

  “What did I say?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “When you talk, all that comes out is nothing. Just noise.”

  Deutsche motioned to Russell, who nodded. All right.

  Sammy turned toward the woman they couldn’t see, made a gesture toward her, and Deutsch put his shoulder against the door and broke the cheesy night chain, which looked as though it was made out of metal, but was plastic coated with shiny stuff to look like stainless steel. The door swung open.

  An unhappy party had been going on in the apartment. The floor was covered with bottles and a couple of bags from McDonald’s, a stuffed animal that was stained and had a leg ripped off, a sink with a dripping faucet. It felt like a collection of broken things, as at the collision of two cars. The baby cried and the woman turned her slack, tired face toward Russell. The man, the woman, the baby, and Deutsche all waited to see what was going to happen.

  The man swung the barrel of the automatic weapon at Deutsche and pulled the trigger. Just a click. Russell strained to hear it. Then he thought, Thank God. Thank God. The baby screamed, its mouth open, pink gums and lips showing, and the woman just stood there and stared. Russell noticed that the ugly gun was turning in the air, like a baton, and then the man grabbed it by the barrel so he could swing it like a club, and as he hit Deutsche in the jaw, Deutsche shot the man in the chest.

  DOWNSTAIRS, RUSSELL, stood around in those blue shadows and felt that chill. Other policemen arrived and began to do their work upstairs, snapping pictures, talking to the neighbors, and taking charge of the dead man’s pistol. While Russell waited, he thought about that lingering chill. Part of it, of course, came from the accumulation of winters here, and the severity of them, too. Warm air came up from the coast and hit the cold air from Canada, and in this collision the wind with the grains of ice in it really would take your skin off, if you gave it the chance. And beneath it all, Russell detected a sense of the inevitable, too, which could be seen in what happened to those signs on the highway north of White River Junction. They had been green and cream-colored just a year or two ago, but now they were a pale, snake-belly white, as though the ice had sandblasted them until they looked like signs in a desert. The shadows downstairs between the buildings had this sense of a slow, steady attrition. And as Russell stood considering the winters, he still couldn’t shake the atmosphere of the apartment upstairs. It clung to him like the odor of smoke.

  When he finally left, after the reports were written and a statement signed, he drove to Zofia’s house. He knew there would be an investigation by the head of the internal affairs section, whom everyone referred to as the Prince of Darkness. He’d look for a way to blame Deutsche and Russell. But it was a clear case of self-defense. It would be all right. Or at least Russell hoped it would. But when he considered an investigation and remembered what had happened, he was left with a new feeling, which was a perfect symbiosis of fear and exasperation.

  The leaves of the poplar trees were silver and pale green, the two colors shimmering in the afternoon breeze. Dust swept up behind Russell’s car, and when he went up to the door of the house, it blew over him like a storm in a dry, lonely place.

  Zofia was in the kitchen. He stood just inside the door and realized that something had changed, and when he looked at her, blinking in the sudden realization of it, she said, “Hey. What’s going on?”

  He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at her as she put a pan on the stove and
turned on the gas with a whooff! So, what had changed? Even here the shadows were portentous, as though something were lurking just beyond the light. Zofia put oil in the pan and some chopped garlic, which began to sizzle.

  “What’s wrong?” she said without looking at him.

  Out the window he saw those silver leaves, trembling in the breeze, and beyond them the last purple sky of evening, with just one or two stars coming out, like holes punched in blue paper.

  “We had some trouble today,” he said.

  Even now, what happened didn’t lend itself to being summed up, but he tried to come up with the words that would convey that apartment, the bottles on the floor, the crying baby, the blood-wet floor, where people had walked and left shapes, like hieroglyphs, of blackish water.

  “I thought I was going to get shot,” said Russell. “And then I thought Tony was going to get shot, too.”

  “You mean the cop with the shaved head?” said Zofia.

  “Yeah,” said Russell. “Yeah. Him.”

  She turned off the pan as she reached for two glasses and poured a little brandy into each one, and then sat down at the kitchen table.

  “How often does that happen?” she said.

  “Not very often,” he said.

  “Really?” she said. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “You think so?”

  He nodded.

  “Or is it more that you hope so?” she said.

  “Both could be true,” he said. “They aren’t contradictory, are they?”

  She shook her head. No, they could both be true.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  “Is it?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

  He was still sweating.

  “There’s more to it than just that,” he said. He picked up her hand. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” she said. “I want you to touch me.”

  “I wasn’t scared of getting killed, because the thing I thought of was that I might lose you.”

  She took a swallow of her drink. Then she put her head down on her arm.

  “Do you really mean that?” she said, her voice muffled by her arm and the surface of the table.

  “Oh,” he said, “I mean it.”

  She looked from one of his eyes to the other, trying to see if he was sincere. It was obvious that she wanted to look right through the pupils, to an interior that was inexhaustible in its possibilities, at once unknowable and still somehow trustworthy. It was this opaque depth that was at the heart of what she would have to believe in.

  “It’s not that mysterious,” he said.

  “There’s where you’re wrong,” she said.

  She got up and turned the stove back on.

  “But do you understand what I’m saying?” he said.

  She nodded, looking down at the pan.

  “I know what you meant,” she said.

  His ears were still ringing from the noise earlier in the afternoon. The sound changed a little when he moved his head one way and another, and in the midst of this sound he thought about how he had begun. In the beginning, when he had first started on the road, he had approached a car without thinking as much as he should have, and then when an older trooper began to give him some hints, Russell went up to a car with a list of things to consider: How did it sit on its springs? Was it carrying something in the trunk? Had any of it been repainted? Had some new hiding place been built in? Was the license plate clean when the car was dirty (which meant the plate could have been stolen)? And, of course, there were other matters, of increasing seriousness, such as how the people in a car moved, or how Russell should behave when he had asked a driver to step out of the car, not to mention other things that he knew to be true, such as the fact that couriers often traveled in pairs, so that if the first car, carrying something it shouldn’t, was stopped, the driver of the second car could kill the trooper who made the stop. All of these things and many others went through his mind as he stepped out into the greasy wind at night, but after a while, much to his amazement, he started looking at the cars he stopped as he had in the beginning, just as cars, but somehow it was different. The same, but different.

  With Zofia, he wanted to know what pleased her and flattered her, what made her unexpectedly angry or unexpectedly sweet, what she wanted to do, not only at work, but desires that she couldn’t really articulate or only dreamed about, like going to Rome or taking a bicycle trip to France, or going to Finland, where they would take a sauna and then roll in the snow. He wanted to be aware of how he could hurt her without meaning to, or to realize that while she had seemed unreasonable, she was actually thinking about something from a point of view he had never considered. And, after having gone through these and too many other small details to list (as many or more as he had to contend with when he was on the road, trying to do the right thing and to stay alive, too), he would be able to look at her again, just as he had in the beginning, and it would be the same, but different. He could imagine the moment when this happened. She would have her hair in a bandana, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as she went around her house picking things up to put in the washer, where she would stand and smell her underarm and strip off her T-shirt and throw that in, too, and stand there in the piles of clean sheets and towels, which were scented with soap. She might look at him then, her stomach in neat segments when she bent over to pick up a towel.

  AT THIS TIME of the year, Tony Deutsche’s mother cooked a dinner for his friends. She was a woman in her late sixties who wore simple, somewhat severe clothes, a gray skirt and a green sweater that buttoned up the front, for instance, and good, serviceable shoes that she could use to walk out to the barn. The dinner was a warmup for Thanksgiving, and she made a turkey, which she cooked in a bag. This year, after going into that apartment in Jacksons Falls, Tony asked if Russell and Zofia wanted to come.

  Tony’s mother and father lived in a house that had once been part of a dairy farm, but there wasn’t much left aside from a barn that was falling down around abandoned stanchions. A sugar house across the street had partially burned down and was falling in, too. The place wasn’t dreary so much as used up, as though you could still feel the effort that it had taken to live on a dairy farm.

  Tony had his jaw wired. During the afternoon, when the turkey was cooking and the house was filled with the smell of it, Tony’s mother kept looking at his jaw, as though the injury were somehow connected to her, too, and that what had been done to him had also been done to her. Then she looked away and went about her business, rolling out dough for a pie, and making a filling. She turned to Zofia and said, “You know the secret to making a really great apple pie? Put in some pears. That’s the trick.” Then she glanced again at her son’s jaw.

  “You’d think they would be more careful,” she whispered to Zofia.

  “I think they were being careful,” said Zofia, quietly.

  “Not careful enough,” said Mrs. Deutsche. She bit her lip and then went back to rolling out the dough with hard, quick movements.

  “I understand,” said Zofia.

  Mrs. Deutsche went on rolling out the dough, glancing up at Zofia once and then going back to work. The dough was on a piece of marble, which was white with dark swirls in it, and when Mrs. Deutsche was done, she said, “That’s too bad.”

  Before dinner, Tony sat in the living room with Russell, Zofia, and a couple of troopers. They talked of a naked man who had painted himself all over in red and blue, and a woman who gave birth to a baby in the backseat of a cruiser. No one wanted to mention the moment when Russell and Tony thought something had come to an end, but in fact had just begun. They could say the guy was an asshole and that he deserved it, but they craved a more substantial answer than that. But what was it? Everyone knew that it was better not to go on about something you couldn’t resolve. It w
as better to hope that you wouldn’t have such bad luck again.

  Tony talked like a man in a dentist’s chair. Dinner was served. Tony’s father, a bald man in a pink shirt and blue jeans, who wore green rubber boots as though he still had cows to milk, carved the turkey with a neat economy, as though he were being filmed for a manual about how to carve a turkey. Everyone sat around the table with plates of turkey and stuffing with mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots, cranberry sauce. Tony looked down at his and, after a moment, got up and went into the kitchen, from which the others heard a glassy clink and then the sound of the blender. In a minute he came back, his dinner turned into a drinkable gruel. He had a straw with him to put into the glass, and he took a sip through it.

  “You know something?” he mumbled. “I’m glad I killed that sucker.”

  On the way home, in Zofia’s car, in the green light from the dashboard, she reached over and took Russell’s hand. Then she sat there, obviously hoping that she wasn’t going to cry, putting her other hand to her face and breathing slowly.

  “What do you suppose the chances are that you are going to have that kind of trouble again?” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, “I don’t think it’s very likely.”

  FRANK KOHLER

  KOHLER TOOK THE ENVELOPE FROM THE MAILBOX by the road and turned toward the house. The label on it showed the silhouette of a man and a woman dancing, the woman looking up, one of her hands on the man’s shoulder, her eyes set on his. The envelope was thin. He ran his fingers along it, squeezing it to feel the letter that was inside. He stood there looking at the graying siding of his house, which appeared to him like a jungle station on the Amazon that one sees, all of a sudden, after coming around a bend in the river. In the silence and isolation of here, he could sense a barely subdued threat that he supposed was the essence of living in an isolated place. Then he felt the envelope again.