Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  “There he is,” said Katryna.

  Kohler tried to imagine Katryna and Dimitry growing up in Moscow. Maybe they took the subway together. Kohler knew, from pictures in the National Geographic, what the Moscow subway looked like. Statues of the New Man and the New Woman. Escalators going down into the depths. The rumble of the trains as they came into the station. He glanced at Katryna as she put her hand on the door of the car and leaned forward, looking out the window. Everything about her was touched by that mysterious, unknown Moscow. He felt that if he took her fingers in his hand and strained, he would be able to feel the rumbling of the subway.

  She opened the door and stepped out, running a hand through her hair. Dimitry was a man of about twenty-five or twenty-six, with high cheekbones. His brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He was tall, slender, wearing a long blue coat such as a sailor in the Russian navy might wear. He leaned over to get his bag out of the luggage compartment, but as he did so, he saw Katryna coming. He stood up and looked at her. His arms were outstretched and she moved into them with a smooth, filmic choreography, and then Kohler sat there, watching as Dimitry held her in the small of her back. He lifted her, so that she was off the ground, and he spun her around, laughing in her hair. He put her down and held her at arms length so that he could look at her. Then he kissed her. She smiled and pointed to the car.

  The suitcase was small and blue, and had a mold stain on it. Dimitry picked it up and took a step or two in the direction of the black car, and as Kohler got out, the sensation of being sized up was so strong that he felt it like a blush. Then Dimitry smiled a toothy, Russian grin. He put out his hand and said, “Frank. Well. It is very nice to meet you.”

  “Yes,” Kohler said.

  They shook hands.

  “Let me get your bag,” Kohler said.

  He took it around to the hatch and opened it and stuck the thing in.

  “Get in,” Kohler said. “Katryna will have to sit on your lap.”

  “This is a nice car,” Dimitry said. “How many horsepower?”

  “Three-ninety,” Kohler said.

  “That’s a lot,” Dimitry said. “Like a Russian tank.”

  He slid across the black leather seat. When Katryna got into the car, she had to pull up her skirt to be able to open her legs enough to sit on his lap. She was bent forward, awkward and yet turning to one side and smiling. Her legs looked white, even in their stockings, against the black interior.

  “It’s been a long time,” she said.

  “Too long,” he said.

  Kohler turned the key.

  “Oh,” Dimitry said. “Listen to that.”

  “I know how to drive,” said Katryna. “He’s been teaching me.”

  She turned a little more, trying to look at Dimitry, squirming on him to do so and then squirming back to look at the road ahead.

  “That’s great,” he said. “You’ll have to show me.”

  Then Dimitry looked out the window as they went along the strip to the entrance of the highway.

  “Just like on TV,” he said.

  “Better,” she said. “You can actually go into the stores.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  “How was your flight?” Kohler said.

  “Long,” he said. “You know, you have been flying for three hours and you realize you are only over Germany.”

  “Did you come right here?” Kohler said.

  “No,” he said. He looked out the window. “I had to go to New York. To Queens. To meet a business associate. Astoria. Have you ever been to Astoria?”

  “No,” Kohler said. “Is it nice?”

  “Not to look at,” said Dimitry.

  “And what kind of business are you in?” said Kohler.

  Dimitry glanced over and said, “Frank, let us wait. I will tell you everything. Right now, I am tired. O.K.?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Import-export,” he said.

  “O.K.,” Kohler said.

  “How is Moscow?” Katryna said.

  “Still filled with beautiful women,” said Dimitry.

  Katryna said something in Russian, and Dimitry shrugged.

  “Not so much,” he said in English.

  On the highway, Kohler sped up to ninety. Katryna was hunched over, her back bent, looking around from time to time and smiling. The road ahead, after a rise, looked like one long ribbon draped over the hills. The river was on the right, shiny as polished ebony, and the hills looked fuzzy, like the fur of a dirty animal. Dimitry rested his hand on her thigh. Then they just drove, going up the highway.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” Kohler said.

  “Well,” he said. “Yes. I haven’t had any real food. Airplanes. Burger King. Taco Bell.”

  “I will make pielmeni for you,” said Katryna.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Not that. We’re in America now. How about a steak? Yeah? And a baked potato and sour cream. That is American.”

  At the bottom of the exit, Kohler looked over at her as she sat on Dimitry, her hands on the dashboard, her small breasts in her black silk blouse. She stared out the windshield as though she had a delicious chocolate in her mouth. Watching her, Kohler rolled through a stop sign at the end of the exit ramp and hit a passing car with a whomp and the sound of tinkling glass. Katryna hit her head on the windshield.

  “Oh,” she said. She put a hand to her head.

  Dimitry said, “What happened?”

  The other car was a small red two-door, driven by a woman with a nose ring and a butch haircut. She got out of the car and held her neck, and looked at the crease in the door. Her car sat there like a bird with a broken wing. Water leaked from under the hood, and it made a kind of pissing sound on the asphalt that mixed with the hissing of the radiator.

  Katryna had a welt on her forehead, and she put her hand on it. Dimitry opened the door and she swung her feet out, and stood in the cold air, still holding her head.

  “Are you all right?” Kohler said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you, Dimitry?” he said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It takes more than that to hurt a couple of Russians.”

  The other driver came over and said, “Oh, my neck.”

  “Do you want an ambulance?” Kohler asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the woman.

  “Well,” said Katryna to Dimitry, “welcome to the States.”

  “Let’s pull over,” Kohler said to the driver of the other car. “Let’s get out of the middle of the street.”

  “Are they Dutch?” said the woman with the nose ring.

  “No,” Kohler said. “Russian.”

  “Tovarich,” she said. “Comrade.”

  Katryna looked at her and then said something to Dimitry. He looked at the driver of the other car with weary disbelief. Then Katryna leaned against him, holding her head. Kohler moved the car out of the way, and the other driver did, too. Then they both got out and looked at the cars in the same way that people do when they are trying to decide to buy an automobile from a car lot.

  “You should have looked where you were going,” said the driver.

  “There were two people in the front seat,” he said.

  “Well, that’s not my problem,” said the driver.

  “Accidents happen,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “To people who don’t look where they’re going.”

  She went on holding her neck.

  “Have you got an insurance card?” she asked.

  “We’re going up to the gas station,” said Katryna. “Up there. The Mobil. Maybe they have coffee. And ice for my head.”

  “Here’s my insurance card,” said the woman with the nose ring.

  She held it out as Kohler turned to watch the two of them walk away, Katryna’s hips swaying in her short skirt at the side of the road, her hand just brushing Dimitry’s, his broad shoulders in his jacket, and the look on his face as he glanced back at Kohler. Then, in response
to something Katryna said, Dimitry shrugged.

  When he turned back, a state police cruiser pulled over and stopped. The trooper had a microphone to his lips, and then he hung it up, turned on the blue flashing lights, and got out, putting on his hat. He had a little name tag that said R. BOYD. Trooper R. Boyd.

  “Looks like you’ve had a little trouble,” he said.

  “My neck hurts,” said the other driver. “He hit me.”

  Kohler kept looking into the distance.

  “It was a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Then the sheriff pulled up. He got out of his red and white car and said, “Hey, Russell, how are things?”

  “All right,” he said. “I thought I’d stop.”

  “Well, I’ll take it from here,” said the sheriff.

  Trooper Boyd looked at Kohler and then up the road, where Katryna and Dimitry had turned onto the apron of the Mobil station.

  “Well, O.K.,” he said. “Looks like no one is hurt.”

  Kohler turned back to him.

  “No,” Kohler said. “I don’t think so.”

  “What about my neck?” said the other driver.

  “Do you need a doctor?” said Trooper Boyd.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “No. I guess not. Let’s just finish this up.”

  Kohler’s shaking knees only added to his sense of shame and disorientation. Trooper Boyd looked at him. “You don’t remember me, do you?” said Boyd.

  “No,” Kohler said. “Why should I?”

  “I went fishing on your land,” said Boyd.

  “Oh,” said Kohler. “You.” He glanced at the Mobil station where Katryna and Dimitry had gone, simply vanishing into the blackness of the doorway. Why were they taking so long? “Yeah. I remember. How are your kids?”

  “They’re not mine,” said Boyd. “But they’re O.K.”

  Kohler nodded.

  “Did they like it?” said Kohler. “Catching those fish?”

  “Yeah, I think they did,” said Boyd.

  “Then come back sometime. It’s O.K.,” said Kohler. He swung his eyes toward Boyd, their glance like a beacon. “It’s all right.” He spoke with a little quaver in his voice, trying to say something more, but then he just stood there, blinking, and finally he glanced up at the Mobil station.

  “Sure,” said Boyd. “Maybe I will. Thanks.”

  The sheriff went on writing down license numbers. The woman with the nose ring glared at Kohler. Katryna and Dimitry came out of the apron of the Mobil, each with a foam cup of coffee, and as they walked along they took small sips. Every now and then one of them spoke, but not much, just a word or a phrase, which even from a distance seemed to imply an irritated confrontation with a difficult fact. Dimitry shrugged and avoided looking at her, and then she spoke again and then again. He was quiet, sipping from his coffee.

  “People catch a lot of fish there,” said Kohler.

  “It’s a good place,” said Boyd. He glanced at Dimitry and Katryna. “Who’s the couple?”

  “They’re not a couple,” he said. “That’s my wife and her cousin.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then he turned to the sheriff. “Well, O.K. See you later.” He turned back to Kohler.

  “Take it easy,” said Boyd.

  “Sure,” said Kohler. “Yeah.” Kohler looked around at the dented car. “As soon as I get out of this mess.”

  “It’s not so bad,” said Boyd.

  Kohler didn’t say anything. Instead, he watched the slow, intimate locomotion of Katryna and her cousin.

  Boyd got into his car and turned around, and after he did so he turned the lights out and went up to the entrance to the highway, getting on and accelerating. Then Kohler took his license back from the sheriff, felt the other driver glare at him again, and got into the car. Katryna got in, on top of Dimitry, hiking up her skirt again.

  “I’m sorry,” Kohler said.

  “What do you have to be sorry for?” said Katryna.

  She shrugged.

  “It’s so nice to see you, Dimitry,” she said. Then they spoke Russian, a slow, sibilant conversation that went back and forth, with Dimitry looking out the window, nodding, asking a question now and then, and finally saying nothing at all as the landscape went by.

  “So,” said Dimitry. “This is the States. Where do all the movie stars live?”

  “Over in New Hampshire,” said Kohler.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  SHEFFIELD, VERMONT, WAS BUILT AT THE junction of the Connecticut and Charles rivers. It was a railroad town, but not many passenger trains came through these days, just one that went from New York to Montreal, although there were still a fair number of freight trains. The bridges in town were often scouted by movie companies looking for antiquated locations, but the bridges were too run-down to suggest any period other than this one. Still, even in this state of slow dissolution, the sense of the past in Sheffield was so palpable that you could imagine the coal smoke of the trains that had come through here seventy years ago, and the piles of railroad ties, which were stacked in the train yard, gave off a tar-like odor of creosote that permeated the town. Sheffield had a diner, and two places that sold secondhand furniture but were trying to pass themselves off as antique stores. It also had a hotel.

  Russell stood in front of it, looking up at the mansard roof and feeling the failed promise of the abandoned railroad yards behind him. Everything about the hotel—the dirty curtains behind the windows, the door with a piece of yellowed tape over a crack in the glass of one pane, and the air of just hanging on—was the kind of thing he saw all the time, neither better nor worse than a lot of it.

  Russell had awakened this morning thinking about coming up here. As he heard Zofia’s soft breathing and felt the warmth of her against his side, he thought of the woman at the side of the road and how she appeared in the flickering blue light from the cruisers, just as he recalled the slowly rising exhaust, which was the haunting blue color of a shadow in snow. Even then, in the warmth of bed, the memory of a torn nipple and of the frost on the dead woman’s eyelashes left him straining, trying to come up with something useful, but he found that he ran up against the same few details and an all-pervasive sense of the tawdry way that this woman had been left in the cold. The tawdry senselessness of it, which seemed to exist in the memory of the colors and the half-frozen landscape, left him at once restless and fatigued, and so he hung between the two, mystified and yet thinking of the hotel in Sheffield. After the woman had been found, a description of her had run in the paper, and the manager of the hotel had called to say that a woman who looked like that had checked in, stayed for a couple of days, and then gone away. She hadn’t taken her things, which she had left in her room, and she had paid for a month in advance, in cash. New twenties.

  Russell had gotten out of bed, put on a pair of jeans and a shirt and sweater, made a cup of coffee, and left a note for Zofia. Then he had driven to Sheffield, but the instant he saw the hotel, he wished he hadn’t come. What was he going to find out that the men who had been assigned to this job hadn’t already discovered? And if he was going to find out nothing, then why come up here on a Saturday morning? Two men came out of the diner down the street, both of them laughing over a joke, the punch line of which one repeated. Then they both laughed again. The odor of coffee hung in the air, and Russell could see the frosted-up window of the restaurant, which looked warm and fragrant inside. He could almost smell the cinnamon rolls, the baking apple pie.

  He opened the door to the hotel and found himself in the lobby. It had high ceilings, now stained by smoke and leaking water. A reception desk with a large marble counter stood at the back of the room beneath a clock with roman numerals on its face. The hands were stuck at three-thirty. There was a desk set on the counter for guests to register, which was a large piece of green plotting paper held in a leather frame, but instead of a fountain pen, there was now a ballpoint that said along its side, in type like palm trees, YAN’S CHINESE TAKE OUT.
/>   The manager was a bald man with scabs on his head that he picked as he sat beneath the stopped clock. And now, when he looked up, he found Russell, who looked around the lobby and then said, holding out his identification, “I’d like to talk to you for a minute or two. That is, if you’ve got the time.”

  “Sure,” said the man. “Time is something I’ve got plenty of.” He pointed at the clock. “We’ve got so much of it that we don’t even bother to count it anymore. Like millionaires.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Russell.

  “There were some other men here,” said the manager. “They already looked at the room. You know, the rent is still paid on it.”

  “That’s what I heard,” said Russell.

  “Well, I guess you want to see her room. The other two did. Let me get the key,” said the manager.

  When he stood up, he was very short—in fact he wasn’t much taller standing up than sitting on his stool. He turned and reached for the key from the rack beneath the empty slots for mail. Russell looked through the glass of the front door at the tracks, which curved away in a silver pair of rails. He had no illusions about what he was going to find, since he knew that he was like a blind man trying to get someplace and who kept going around a room with no door. The movement in the dark, the touching of the few familiar features on the wall, the molding, the picture in a frame all suggested advancement and might even be momentarily reassuring, but in the end, sooner or later, he’d have to admit to how things really were. And yet even that eluded him, since that frigid air, that blue smoke of exhaust, the woman’s face, which had been reduced to something no longer human, were so impenetrable in their emptiness as to suggest a profound and appalling vacuum. It was this emptiness that had sucked Russell into this place, and while he knew that more knowledge of it would only make him feel worse, he still tried to grasp that appalling vacancy. He saw hints of it in the dusty stillness of the lobby, in the wet breathing of the manager, and Russell supposed he would see other details in the woman’s room, although they would be far worse.