Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  “Ignore him,” said Russell.

  “I don’t know,” said Zofia. “I just don’t know.”

  “Is it cold yet, or is it still warm?” Russell asked Marshall.

  “It’s getting cold,” he said. “How do you know it’s getting cold?”

  “I can remember,” Russell said. He turned to Zofia. “Don’t you have extra clothes in the car?”

  Zofia glanced up the bank.

  “Yes,” she said. “But maybe we should all go back to the car. We can change there.”

  “Let’s have our lunch and then go,” said Russell. “Screw him.”

  “You used a swear word,” said Jack.

  “It’s not a swear word,” said Marshall. He sniffled. “ ‘Fuck’ is a swear word.”

  “That’s enough,” said Zofia. She sighed. “All right.”

  She started walking along the stream to the car, but after ten yards or so she turned and looked back. The boys began to compare the fish, but they kept coming up against the fact that one was ugly and the other so pretty.

  “One’s bigger,” said Russell. “The other’s a rainbow. That makes them the same.”

  “Mine’s meaner,” said Jack. “See, it would eat anything.”

  “Sure. It’s ugly. It has to be,” said Marshall. “It’s yours.”

  “You wet your pants,” said Jack. “Wait until I tell.”

  “You told before,” said Marshall. “You always tell.”

  Russell turned toward the bank. Kohler started walking through the dead leaves, which made little waves around his feet. As he came, Russell thought, It’s the crying. There’s something about the crying. Above Kohler the tree trunks rose to the light, and the straggly upward grasp of them reminded Russell of hands in the midst of a desperate prayer.

  “He’s coming again,” said Jack.

  “What are we going to do?” said Marshall.

  “Nothing,” said Russell. “It’ll be fine.”

  The boys froze. Kohler walked with a long-legged, distance-consuming gait, as though he knew every piece of dead wood here so well that he didn’t pause when he came up to one, but just stepped over it without breaking stride. Russell turned to face him.

  Kohler stood opposite Marshall. There was a lingering essence that came from the boy having cried here, a slight change in atmosphere like a drop in temperature. Kohler lifted his hand again, as though offering something, but he stopped in the middle so that whatever he had intended was only half-realized and nonsensical. Then he sat down on a piece of dead-wood so that his face was on the same level as Marshall’s.

  “Don’t cry. It doesn’t do any good,” said Kohler.

  “Look,” said Russell. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  Kohler went on staring at Marshall. Then he blinked and swallowed.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I just get tired of people coming in here. See?”

  “Yes,” said Marshall.

  “You know why crying doesn’t do any good?” said Kohler. “It makes you lonely. And what good is that?”

  Kohler blinked again.

  “Ah, shit,” he said. “Goddamn it. You want to know what does some good? If someone gives you a hard time, hit them. Don’t fight to fight. Fight to win.”

  “That’s enough,” said Russell.

  Marshall started to cry again.

  “You’re scaring him,” said Russell. “Stop it.”

  Kohler turned to Marshall.

  “Hey, hey,” he said. “It’s okay. I don’t mean anything. Forget about me. That’s a nice fish. What kind is it?”

  “A bass,” said Marshall, blubbering.

  “No kidding, a bass. Do you have a lunch?”

  Marshall nodded.

  “What kind of lunch?” asked Kohler.

  “Egg salad sandwiches,” said Jack.

  “Have your sandwiches here,” said Kohler.

  “Okay,” said Russell. He stepped closer to Kohler. “We’ll do that.”

  Kohler seemed to recede back into that stance of complete, statue-like immobility, which, in its stillness, in its complete quietness, was more threatening than if he had moved, since everything about him suggested a building up of pressure rather than a release, an increasing intensity that only appeared calm in his own contemplation of it. Russell stood about a foot from him, their faces close together.

  “I’m sorry,” said Kohler. “I’m not myself recently.”

  Then he turned on his heel and covered the land by the stream in that same long-legged gait, stepping over the deadwood with a fluid ease and then going up the bank.

  Zofia came along the stream now, her pink blouse the same shade as the leaves of the sugar maples, so much so that she seemed to emerge from them. She had a black plastic sack with her, and she took Marshall to one side, helping him strip off the wet pants and underwear. His feet were covered with leaves, but he shoved them into the dry jeans as quickly as he could, to get away from being naked. Then he picked up his shoes. Before he put them on, Russell brushed the forest litter, the moth and beetle colored twigs and leaves off the boy’s webbed feet. The deformity of them made Russell instinctively turn and look up the bank again, but Kohler was gone.

  Then they sat down on a blanket that Zofia had spread out. She had sweet pickles and chips along with the sandwiches. They ate quietly, waiting for Kohler to come back, but he had vanished into the woods at the top of the bank. Russell shrugged and tried to forget him and then looked at the dead fish, the ugly one green and shiny, like it was smeared with petroleum, the other sparkling and perfectly shaped.

  “Who do you think that was?” Zofia said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just some guy. You see them all the time.”

  “Do you?” said Zofia.

  FRANK KOHLER

  WHEN THE BARBER WAS DONE, THE EFFECT WASN’T quite what Frank had wanted. He felt the buzz of his hair on his fingertips, which was a lot like the lingering sensation left by the barber’s electric shears. He guessed that he would go without shaving for three or four days and get a pair of dark glasses, the black wraparound kind. Then he would get a dark jacket and charcoal pants, and maybe a black shirt, too. He didn’t think a white tie was a good thing, but he considered it. To get the look of a Russian gangster, he would buy a black shirt and wear it open at the neck.

  In the morning before he went to meet the plane in Boston, he stood in front of the mirror. The stubble on his face made him look a little more bumlike than menacing, but the effect was more evocative when he put on his black shirt and black coat. He had supposed that Katryna would be reassured by someone who looked like a gangster, since in Russia such people had money. Was this right? He didn’t have the least idea. His hands shook when he thought about making a mistake. He was certain about one thing, but he wasn’t sure whether it helped in this case: Russians were reassured by the ominous, or maybe they had just gotten used to it.

  He gagged and brought up a little blood, and then he washed out his mouth. As he trembled at the sink, squeezing the sides of it, he tried to distract himself by imagining the sound of the airplane on which Katryna was flying, the rush of the air outside it, just as he tried to have a notion of the distance to Moscow. For instance, how far east of Germany was it? Could she sleep on the plane, and if she did, what did she dream of? Working as a conductor? Her uniform? The bits of paper that she would throw into the air like confetti? He imagined the sense of the airplane’s passage through the cold air as being indistinguishable from the buzz of the clippers at the barber’s. His dread, his fear, his ridiculous hope all blended into one sensation, a unified apprehension that left him wishing he had taken his chance when he had it with that asshole in the Combat Zone.

  He concentrated on the noise of wind around the eaves, the toilet upstairs that ran a little bit, the pitch of it like the most diminutive cry. He opened the icebox and took out the flowers that he had there, the roses dark and almost black on the inside where the petals d
isappeared into the center of the flower. The cold air held the wonderful smell of the flowers, and Kohler hesitated with his face close to the cool opening of the refrigerator. Then he took them into the bedroom, where he turned back the covers and looked at the new sheets. The petals of the roses came off in bunches, and he spread them there on the sheet. They looked like drops of red paint on a white floor. He spread them around and stood back. Then he sat on the foot of the bed for a while, looking out the window.

  The black car left him with a vague sense that it was too blunt, too vulgar where delicacy might be required. But what car would suggest delicacy? His old Chevrolet? That was like failed sensibility itself, an automobile driven by a bookkeeper with no sense of humor. The new car still conveyed a sense of strength, and the color added that same mystery of blackness and hinted at the endless erotic power of the unknown. At least with mystery you always had the chance that you were onto the right thing.

  He sat behind the wheel with the door open, one foot on the gravel of his driveway. His uneasiness existed here with such intensity that it was like being in a bell jar that was made of the clear substance of his anxiety. Then he slammed the door, started the engine, and wheeled down the drive to the main road. He thought of the rooms where he had grown up, the atmosphere that he seemed to carry wherever he went, like his own private genie that just wouldn’t go back into the bottle. Then he just listened to the sound of the engine and looked at the gauges from time to time, tach steady, oil pressure good, temperature a little warm.

  Kohler had hired the immigration lawyer that Mrs. Blanchett had suggested, a man with a Southern accent and blond hair that wasn’t turning white so much as just fading and leaving the yellow of it looking nicotine-stained. He had arranged the wedding by proxy. In addition to his normal fee, the lawyer had charged Kohler close to a thousand dollars for bribes in Moscow, although there was no way to get a receipt for a bribe, and this left Kohler feeling that he had been screwed somehow. Anyway, they were married.

  In the tunnel on the way to the airport in Boston, the tile on the ceiling looked icy from the headlights of the cars. The tunnel went under the river, and while Kohler only saw the tiled walls and the oily asphalt ahead of him, he still was aware of the weight of the river. The cars ahead of him stopped and he sat there, tapping the steering wheel. He glanced up at the ceiling and imagined the green-gray water, tainted with oil and whatever else had been thrown into the harbor.

  Kohler pulled into the airport’s parking lot, where there was a machine with an arm painted with slashes of black and white. He rolled down the window and pushed a knob on the parking machine. The ticket, which stuck out of a slot like a small paper tongue, was cheap and gray. Kohler guessed it was like the stuff the Soviets used for forms. Or toilet paper. He had never seen any, but he was pretty sure it was rank and ridiculous, but then Frank thought, Great, here I am thinking about Soviet toilet paper. What the fuck is wrong with me? He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, his face nearly hidden by the band of his dark glasses.

  Frank pulled out the ticket, but the arm didn’t move. He waited. Then he tried to take another ticket, but when he pushed the knob, nothing came out of the machine. There were now two cars behind him, and then a third pulled in. Kohler got out and stood next to the machine and hit it with the heel of his palm. The machine was red and covered with grime that must have come from the jet fuel, and so the effect was like a Coke machine in a coal town, cheerful, but defeated by the circumstances of where it was. The car directly behind Kohler’s was filled with people from India or Pakistan who spoke to one another with irritated voices. Then they stared at him, and as they did he noticed that one of them was wearing a pair of dark glasses just like his.

  The driver made a gesture of dismissal. A woman in traditional dress sat in the backseat, and with her there were a couple of kids, one of them playing a Gameboy. The driver, who wore a turban, honked the horn. He pointed at the machine that produced the tickets and then at Kohler, as though he was too stupid to take a ticket. Overhead, a jet whined, the pitch of it changing as it came in lower, the noise having an urgency to it. British Air. Kohler stood there watching it go past. This was the airline that Katryna was on.

  The sky was clear but still tinted by the reddish smoke of the jet engines, so that everything looked like the highway at rush hour, and in that tint Kohler turned to face the car behind his. The driver started yelling, although it was in a language Kohler couldn’t understand, and when he got closer, the driver put his turbaned head out of the car and gesticulated. The woman in the back glared. Kohler could smell a spice, something in their cooking that clung to their clothes, saffron, perhaps, or garlic or ginger. Couldn’t they see his haircut and his dark glasses? Why were they making noise?

  “Back up,” Kohler said.

  “Back up? Back up!” said the driver. “I have to meet a plane. Twelve-forty-five. Twelve-forty-five!”

  The woman in the back jabbered at the man in the passenger seat. The kid in the back kept on with his Gameboy.

  “Air India!” said the driver.

  “It’s broken, kaput!” Kohler said.

  “Don’t threaten me,” said the driver. He put a hand under his neck and made a quick cutting motion, as though slitting a throat.

  “The machine is broken,” Kohler repeated.

  “You said you were going to break his head,” said the man in the passenger seat.

  “No,” Kohler said.

  The planes continued to go over. There were even more cars behind the Pakistanis’ now, and the drivers were honking their horns. The sound of it, Kohler supposed, was like a traffic jam in India, or someplace where there was no order at all. Just everyone grasping for what they could get, driven by horrible necessity. The smell of kerosene was suddenly very strong in the air.

  The man on the passenger side of the car got out and went over to the machine and pressed a button and a ticket came out. The arm rose.

  “Here,” he said. He pushed the ticket at Kohler.

  The driver made a gesture of contempt.

  “Twelve-forty-five!” he said. “Flight number three-nineteen!”

  The black door of Kohler’s car was still open, and he got in and put the thing into gear, making the tires chirp as he pulled away and seeing in the rearview mirror that the Pakistanis were gesticulating and speaking to one another. They made a point of turning into the row beyond the one where he parked, as though this gave them a small moral superiority. Kohler turned off the engine and sat there. He ran his hand through his haircut. Why hadn’t they been impressed? For all they knew, he could have been a thug. In fact, when he thought about it, he had contempt for their lack of perception. They had gotten off easy.

  Then he counted, one, two, three, four, five. What was that smell? Coriander? Cilantro? He got out and locked the door after slamming it shut. The Pakistanis made their way through the parking lot toward the International Arrivals Building. They walked with a quick, hurrying gait, which gave them the appearance of being on a conveyor belt. One of them looked back at Kohler, and then said something to the man with the turban, who kept staring straight ahead.

  Then all of them came up to the International Arrivals Building, which was an ugly structure of glass and aluminum. A metal awning stuck out in front. The doors were double glass ones, smeared with a million handprints, and on each side of the entrance the police had put up barriers, so that there was a path in the middle, right in front of the doors, but on both sides there were crowds of Indians and Pakistanis, all of them speaking languages he didn’t know. About ten feet away, the family that had been behind him at the parking lot entrance lined up. The child was still playing his Gameboy. People came through the glass doors, carrying boxes tied with string, or new suitcases, and all of them had one of two expressions, a starstruck wonderment, as though they had just stepped off a flying saucer, or they just looked tired.

  Kohler said to a man next to him, “Do you know what flight this
is?” but the man just shook his head. Either he didn’t know or he didn’t speak English. When the child with the Gameboy stepped away from his mother, toward Kohler, his mother grabbed him with a jerk that made him start to cry, and then the man with the turban glared at Kohler. What was he doing to his son? The other man, with dark glasses, made a gesture with his arm, like the gate of the parking machine, going up and down. The woman shrugged. Kohler wished, on the verge of prayer, that he hadn’t put those petals on the sheets.

  Katryna was taller than he thought she’d be. She came out of the door, dragging one bag and carrying another, exhausted, just looking around with that bewildered wonderment. Kohler stepped out to her, brushing by the man with the turban.

  “Hey, hey,” said the Pakistani.

  “Do you see that!” said the man with the dark glasses.

  “You think because I am an immigrant you can treat me that way?”

  Katryna looked at Kohler and then searched the crowd. He walked directly up to her, then he tipped his dark glasses down his nose so that she could see his eyes.

  “You! You!” said the Pakistani.

  “Is there something wrong?” said Katryna.

  “I’m talking to you,” said the Pakistani.

  “Look,” said Kohler. “Be polite.”

  “Polite! Polite!” said the Pakistani. “You can’t even get in the parking lot.” He turned to his family and nodded. See?

  “I told you,” said Kohler.

  The Pakistani said something in the language that Kohler couldn’t understand, and as Kohler was about to take a step toward the man, Katryna put her arms around him, her slender figure coming up against him, her hair smelling of Russia. The man with the turban stopped gesticulating, shrugged, and got back on the curb. The family formed a row, all staring at Kohler and Katryna. Then they looked at one another and shrugged. The child went back to his Gameboy.