Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  “You coming?” said the manager. He was wearing a brown button-up cardigan, and there was a stale odor around him, like in an old people’s home.

  “Yes,” said Russell. “I guess.”

  Both of them climbed the musty padded stairs, which muted their footsteps. Russell tried to imagine the sound of the woman’s shoes on these stairs. And yet there was nothing to connect the woman at the side of the road with the woman who had walked out of her room. The detectives who had been here said that the clothes in the room had been bought from the thrift shop in town, and that there was no way to find out anything beyond that.

  Russell and the manager went down the hall and along the carpet, which was new and bright pink, although the carpet on the stairs was brown. The manager unlocked the door of a room and pushed it open and then stood back. “There you go,” he said.

  Russell stood at the threshold. The room itself was distinguished by the dim light that came in from the side of the shade. A green carpet, a double bed with a white spread textured with lines of fuzz, a dressing table with a chrome-framed kitchen chair in front of it. The manager made a sound of wet breathing, winded from climbing one flight of stairs. Then Russell tried to understand the sense of desperation that seemed to exist here like a hidden force, unseen but still powerful. He stepped into the room as though someone were sleeping here.

  In the closet he found a couple of dresses—one blue, one black, and one with a red and yellow pattern of flowers. Underwear in a drawer, which looked like it had come from Kmart. No books, no paper, nothing that showed anything about where she had come from or what her plans were. There was a toothbrush in the bathroom and a stick of deodorant, but that was it. Russell guessed that she must have taken her cosmetics bag with her when she had left.

  “She was polite,” said the manager. “Always said good morning and good afternoon. Had a little accent, you know. Maybe South America. Spain. Very refined, in a way. Didn’t say much beyond good day.”

  Russell looked at the mirror, which was covered with dust, and then at the bedstand. A newspaper from a month before still lay there, turned back to the want ads. Surely she had been looking for something, but what? An apartment? A car? Another kind of life? Then he just stood in that sad atmosphere of the room, and as he waited, he could sense the evanescent nature of the woman’s presence, as though she was slowly disappearing, even now, and that the last of her things would soon be gone and then there would be nothing. He tried to resist this, as though by concentrating on the few things that were still here and on the presence that was left, he could slow the process down. His inability to do anything more than that only increased his sense of the enormity of what had happened to this woman; he knew that one of his struggles was to keep this murder from being absorbed into the mundane details of his job. Soon, if nothing turned up, she would be forgotten, and being absorbed into that, into the simple ability to forget, left Russell with a greater sense of a vacuum that existed just beyond the appearance of things.

  Russell went over to the window and put up the shade. Maybe a little light would do some good, but the room was one of those places that was better in the shadows. As he looked around, wanting to pull the shade down again, he felt a rumbling, a trembling that shook the entire hotel, and then he turned to the window, where he saw the engine of a freight train, not the black and glistening and huffing train of the past, but a new diesel, vibrant and seemingly unstoppable. It came along those silver curves of track, the engineer visible inside the engine, behind the window, reaching up to work the horn, which sounded in long, piercing blasts, and then the engine disappeared and Russell was left with the sound of the passing freight cars—click-ah-clack, click-ah-clack—and as he stood there in that room, remembering the woman, he recalled what a man had told him years before. It was what the sound of a freight car’s wheels really said, which was “Cut your head off, cut your head off, cut your head off.” Russell looked around the room again. He sat down on the bed hearing the low squeak of the springs, and as the sound of the train slipped away, he imagined that sound when the woman got into bed alone in this room. He remembered the taste of blood from the night before, when he had sucked Zofia’s finger, the saltiness of it like fury itself. For an instant he wished Zofia were here so he could say, I understand. I really do. What isn’t uncertain?

  “Do you think she was the one they found?” said the manager. “You know, by the road?”

  “I don’t know,” said Russell.

  “Well,” said the manager, “I hope they get the bastard.”

  “Yeah,” said Russell. He pulled down the shade. “Thanks for letting me look around.”

  “Any time,” said the manager. “I’m always here.”

  FRANK KOHLER

  KOHLER LIKED THE ISOLATED LOCATION OF HIS house. When he was alone, the landscape seemed to spread out from him as though he lived at the center of everything. It was where he could be clear-minded. He had been thinking of taking advantage of this privacy in late June, when the fireflies came out in the evening: that would be the time when he and Katryna could take a blanket down by the brook so they could lie there in the sparkling darkness, under those greenish and flickering streaks.

  Kohler came up to the house after taking the dog for a walk along the property lines. The dog had seemed to understand that the purpose of the walk was to surprise a trespasser. They had looked for an hour, but had been disappointed, and now, with the habitual stealth of patrolling the property lines, they came up to the kitchen window. The window caught the afternoon sun, and it was easy to see into it when the light was at the back of someone who looked at it from the outside. Kohler and the dog came up to the window and stood next to a tree there, a maple that was eighty feet high.

  Inside, Katryna stepped from one side of the room to another. Dimitry was sitting down, at the table, reading Kohler’s copy of The War in Gaul. Katryna wore a short black skirt and a white blouse, appearing almost formal as she walked back and forth, pacing with a brooding and sultry urgency. She had perfect posture, which came from the years when she had studied ballet. She stopped at the sink and got a glass of water, looking down toward the brook. Kohler saw her full lips pushed against the glass, slightly open to take a drink. Finally, with a shrug, she put the glass down and turned back to Dimitry.

  She spoke to him. He looked up with an expression of surprise, as though she was making an offer he had always wanted, although not quite the way he had anticipated it. Then he nodded, yes, yes, of course, if that’s what you want. He reached into his pocket and took out his wallet, from which he counted out a hundred and seventy dollars. She picked it up and counted it, too, quickly and yet making sure that the amount was right. She put it on the table. Eight twenties and one ten, as nearly as he could tell. A hundred and seventy.

  Then she reached under her skirt, hiking it up to her waist. She was wearing thin, black underwear, so fine that the shape of each hip was visible under the mesh. With both hands she slipped the underwear down to her ankles and then stepped out and put them on the book, lying open on the table. Kohler looked from the small ball the underwear made in the middle of his book to the money.

  The desire to flee and yet the horrifying impulse to watch were the same as when one of Jerri’s men, a Bob Jack, had given him twenty dollars to hide in the closet and watch what Jerri did. Kohler had held that twenty-dollar bill there in his confinement, there in the tickle of the stockings that hung on the back of the door. The closet had been redolent with sweat and perfume. The clothes had a musty quality, which seemed hot around him as he had wanted to get away, but didn’t know how. He had folded the bill up, trying to make it smaller and smaller, and when he did so, he still glanced out the crack of the closet door, where Jerri’s head went up and down as Bob Jack winked at him.

  Outside the window, Kohler looked down at the black dog, who stood there without making a sound, or moving. The landscape was quiet and indifferent, as though nothing were happening at al
l. The sky was gray, illuminated by the muted circle of the sun, which was the milky color of a light-bulb. Then Kohler turned back to the window.

  Katryna stood just back from Dimitry’s face. She stepped a little closer and then put one hand at the hem of the skirt, lifting it a little. He said something, but Kohler couldn’t hear it, and even if he could have, he guessed it was Russian. She bent down, her lips not quite touching Dimitry’s. They both waited here, at this moment, as though the distance between them and the attraction that was pulling them closer together were not only overwhelming but pleasurable, too. They seemed suspended between two worlds: the proper one in which they behaved, and the one in which all things were pleasurable and inevitable. It was the confinement of watching that Kohler recognized, the same as being trapped in that dark closet. He trembled with the realization that it was the same as before, as though this experience had a knack of repeating itself, and that he had to stand there and watch, no matter how much he wanted to get away. Then, with an effort that left him exhausted and sick, he turned away.

  It was easy going down to the brook. At the bottom there was a flood-plain where the brook overflowed in April, although now it was dry and filled with driftwood, entire trunks of trees that had washed down here in the spring flood. Kohler sat on one, with the dog in front of him. Then he wondered if Katryna got down on her knees and looked Dimitry right in the eye with it in her mouth, the way she had with him. Then he thought that this was probably right. That’s probably what was happening. He guessed Dimitry was going to get his hundred and seventy dollars’ worth.

  “Is that what she’s doing?” he said to the dog.

  It put its paw into Kohler’s lap, and Kohler felt the rough pads. Then he held the dog’s foot, thinking about how Katryna had appeared with her skirt hiked up as she stepped into the bedroom, looking back at Dimitry over her shoulder and speaking a language Kohler didn’t understand and never would.

  Kohler knelt by a pool in the brook and splashed water on his face, the cold shock of it diminishing as he did it again and again. He thought of the fluid movement of her hips as she walked, the quiver in her bottom as she went out of the kitchen. The dog yawned and made a little chomping noise when its jaws snapped back together—in the midst of the yawn its tongue curled out like the shape of the neck of a violin. All he could think about was the woodsy sensation of the water in his mouth, and that it reminded him of what it was like to kiss her between her legs. The difference was the coldness. She was much warmer.

  He listened to the sound of the running water in the brook, and he heard, too, the chirping of birds that hadn’t cleared out for the south yet, chickadees, he supposed, little black birds with a white mask. Like small Lone Rangers, or did the Lone Ranger have a black mask? At the moment, he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t ever really seen the Lone Ranger on TV, since it was before his time. He had only heard about it.

  The paleness of the sky had a new quality, which he thought was more like the white of bleached bones. He faced the prospect of a bland landscape while he sat there in the stink of the dog’s breath. The fatigue of it washed over him, and left him thinking that it would be hard to lift a hand or move, or even swallow.

  He looked at the dog.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  It sat down.

  “Roll over,” he said, and it rolled over. Then he picked up a stick, as though it weighed ten pounds, and threw it into the stream. The dog went after it, grabbing it in two strides, and came back, dripping, and put the wet thing into his hand. Perfect obedience. Then it put its paws out on the ground, as though stretching, but really crouching, eyes on Kohler, wanting to play.

  Then Kohler stood up and started walking back toward the house, the black dog at his heels. The metal roof glinted in the mild sunlight. He guessed that the sunset would be beautiful this afternoon, when the light would be soft and indistinct and looking like the smoky residue of desire.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  ZOFIA AND RUSSELL WENT TO THE FOOD CO-OP IN town. They took a shopping cart, like the chariot of the domestic, and when they walked by a mirror, Russell saw the two of them together, Zofia in her blue jeans and man’s pink shirt, her shiny hair and thin hands looking at once ordinary and yet romantic, too. In the mirror he saw a man with a flattop haircut. He had a narrow waist, and big hands, and wore blue jeans. Her doubts about having a child had infected him now, since he trusted her, and if she was clear-headed about this—why, then maybe he was the one who was making a mistake, and yet, if he was, if that was really the case, was what he did just vanity and a swaggering impulse? So, as he stood there, seeing their reflections, he was left with a sense of a collision between common sense and his beliefs about what he should do.

  They bought dinner, which they were going to fix together: lettuce and tomatoes, cucumber, salad greens, mesclun, radicchio. She said, “Radicchio.” Something wet and vibrant in her lips, like a salacious promise. He knew, when he heard the word, that when he was alone on the road late at night and thinking of her he would say “Radicchio.” They bought chicken, which they were going to make with Marsala and sautéed garlic.

  A man stood with a plastic basket at the end of an aisle, his face scarred with acne, his hair pulled into a ponytail. He had a tattoo on one arm, not the decorative kind that young people got these days, but a crude prison tattoo. Russell looked at the man’s pale face, his stooped shoulders, his feral alertness. Russell turned back to the basket, and realized that he had arrested this man when he had been stationed up north, and yet he wasn’t certain what it had been for. Drugs, he guessed. Now, he supposed, the man had moved his operations farther south.

  Russell and Zofia bought other things, aside from what they needed for dinner. He thought, Yes, maybe this is a way that we can begin. Isn’t there magic in these things, some indication of the person who uses them? By magic, he meant that a thing had some meaning when it was used by someone he cared about.

  They went along the ends of the aisles, although Russell could still feel the glance of the man he had arrested, like the pressure of sunlight. Zofia stopped in front of bins of coffee, and then filled up a small bag and said, “Do you like the Colombian?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds good.”

  She poured the beans into the machine that ground them, just like one in a general store years ago. He looked up and saw the man with the tattoo and the bad skin. Russell thought of saying hello, but maybe it was better like this.

  In the next aisle she picked up a box of pads to use when she had her period. She was going to need them soon, rather than the tampons she usually used. He looked around the store, struck by the beauty of the ordinary, people just living in the moment, not posing, not showing ambition, not being devious. It was like an exercise in which two things were blended, the unbelievably mundane and the profound and mysterious.

  He wanted to buy something that showed a small aspect of himself. She looked at a list she had pulled out of her pocket, standing there in her tight jeans, moving her weight from one hip to another. She glanced up and Russell reached over and took a box of Q-tips off the shelf and dropped it into the cart. She took a strand of her hair that had gotten loose and tucked it behind her ear. This was a gesture she made when she was thinking things over. If she asked him what the Q-tips were for, would he say, “To clean my pistol. It’s hard to get the oil off the safety catch”? Or, “I use them to keep my ears clean”?

  Then he saw the man from up north talking to a kid, about twenty, who also had a homemade tattoo on his forearm, a messed-up cross that made him look discounted, like a young man who has already made the mistake that he is surely going to make not only once, but again and again, although each time it will get worse. Zofia opened the glass door of the freezer, all misted on one side, the frigid air flowing out. It was so cold Russell imagined it was water spilling from the case onto the floor, and the touch of it on his shoes, around his ankles, left him considering that tattooed kid and his friend.
Zofia folded up her list and stuck it into the pocket of her jeans. She had to lift up her shoulder and make her arm straight to get it in. He stood there in that pool of cold air.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  At the checkout counter they heard the beeping of the machine as the clerk scanned everything. Then they paid, sharing out money in a comfortable, easy way, Zofia’s coming out of her pocket in a series of crumpled bills, Russell’s neat and crisp from his wallet, both of them giggling at the difference. He picked up the brown paper bag and went out through the door, which opened automatically, and as they went, she said, picking up the Q-tips, “What are these for?”

  “My ...” he said. “My ears.”

  “Oh,” she said, careful now as she dropped the box back into the bag.

  They went to the dry cleaners, then to the hardware store. They got into the car that was parked at the curb, and as he closed the door the sound scared some pigeons, which rose in one flickering mass and wheeled around, their wings seeming to have a green tint in the sunlight. As he saw the filaments of light in her hair, as he looked around at the chrome of the cars parking nearby, he was almost disoriented with the sense of being here, in this moment, as though he stood at the bottom of an enormous funnel that brought down to him so much life he felt the keen buzz of it.

  FRANK KOHLER

  KOHLER STEPPED INTO THE HALL BEHIND THE front door. The house had a particular peacefulness that only comes after one thing. The dog was quiet, too. They walked into the kitchen, where Katryna’s underwear still sat in the middle of The War in Gaul. The dog went to its water bowl and started lapping, and the clicking of its nails and the noise of its tongue in the bowl changed the silence from one of peaceful exhaustion to expectation. And in the middle of the transformation, Kohler opened the cabinet at the side of the kitchen door and reached inside for his Mannlicher rifle. It had set triggers, a forearm that extended to the muzzle, and a stock with a cheekpiece. As Kohler felt the weight of it, and when he opened the bolt and pushed a brass hull into the magazine, feeling the engagement of the cartridge, he had the sense of the object offering something necessary and right: it was going to give him a little control and definition in the face of everything being up in the air. He felt a little less ethereal and drifting, like a phantom, when he touched the weight of the rifle.