Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  The sunlight lay on his face like a bright film, and he stood in it, trying to concentrate on the warmth.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” she said. “What do you say?”

  Kohler opened his eyes. All he could see was the bright cherry-red hair of the young woman. She smiled in that crooked, half-high, totally reassuring way. She still had her broom. She took it over to the corner by the trash-can and leaned it there.

  “All right,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “We don’t have to get into names, do we?” she said.

  “I guess not,” he said.

  “Let me get my coat,” she said.

  She went into the door from which she had emerged, and Kohler was left alone. He looked around and then reached into his pocket for his keys. She came back wearing a down coat that was leaking a few white feathers, and as she walked up to him, she reached out her hand and took the keys.

  “O.K.?” she said. “Let me drive.”

  They came to the car and she opened the driver’s side door. She saw the rifle in the back.

  “What’s that for?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then he threw a jacket over it.

  “Well, all right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  She got in, adjusted the seat, and put the key in the ignition.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN RUSSELL HAD BEEN A state trooper for a couple of years, he was called to investigate a burglary that had taken place at what had been his grandfather’s hunting camp. After Russell’s grandfather had died and then Russell’s father, too, the camp had been sold, and he hadn’t been back since the sale. He pulled up in front of the place and found the door open. Although the new owner hadn’t been there to show Russell the broken window, Russell had a pretty good idea what had happened, and now that he was here, he was more certain than ever.

  When the camp had still been in the family it had existed as a physical place, but it had an emotional gravity, too, since it had been the center of family life. This was so palpable as to leave Russell a little disoriented when the place was sold. Even now he didn’t know what he missed the most, the geography or the tug the place had exerted on him all year.

  Often, before the camp was sold, he went there in the summertime, attracted by the moody atmosphere and something, else, too, which he didn’t quite understand. He usually stopped when the stone building first came into view in the same the way one naturally hesitates at the first silence of a churchyard, among the gray stones and the damp and shady atmosphere of such places.

  When the house wasn’t used at the hunt, it was usually empty, punctuated only by an occasional break-in by young people who knew the place was deserted. For Russell, when he arrived in late August or early September, the first moment after crossing the threshold was always mesmerizing. Maybe it was the lingering presence of the young people who broke in to use a bed. Their delicious privacy, made all the more pleasurable by the breaking glass and the quick undressing, seemed to hang there in the silence as a footnote to the other things that had happened in this house. Maybe the young people who broke in had never been completely naked together before the privacy they found here. Anyway, when Russell came about the burglary, he guessed young people had broken in. Just like always.

  When he stood there, as a policeman, Russell remembered the summer when he was eighteen. Then he had gone back just like the other times. He’d stepped inside, into the musty silence of the place, which seemed connected to the ashes in the fireplace. This silence was reassuring, and yet it left him with an ache that he couldn’t quite feel completely, a hint of mortality or loss, which was compensated by the almost-comfort of being here. The door made a squeaking sound behind him as he shut it and then walked in and stood in front of the fireplace. Outside he could see that the sunlight was fading, and that shadows were sweeping into the clearing in front of the building. The tall grass outside was mowed once a year, in the late fall. Now the highlights in it from the sunlight disappeared as the clouds covered the sky, not in the usual collection of lumps of mist and uneven clots, but all at once in the purple wall with which a thunderstorm arrived in the mountains. Russell sat down to wait.

  He thought of his grandfather’s story of a snake that was supposed to live in the house. Of course, Russell thought that his grandfather had been telling tall tales, and let it go at that. Russell had never seen the snake. The light in the room dimmed, and then turned gray tinted with purple. Russell felt dampness and the electric charge of the air that seemed to seep in through the cracks in the door and down the chimney. The purple light darkened.

  He sat on the fender that was next to the fireplace, and as he did so, he saw an array of sparks of static electricity, little bits that seemed to bloom suddenly, in the way snowflakes appear at the beginning of a snowstorm. A sound accompanied the appearance of these hot yellow specks, a crackling that Russell heard in the midst of a needling rush over his arms and shoulders, a chill that seemed to be composed of points that were as sharp and as sudden as the sparks. He supposed that this was ball lightning, and that it was flowing down the chimney and spreading around the room. It came in pulses. First the particles of light, then more static as the room was charged again, the invisible presence growing until the electric arcs, just as bright and as visible as those of a Fourth of July sparkler, returned with a ripping sound, like Velcro being pulled apart. And with this progression there was the increasing odor of ozone. Everything about this was at once soothing and frightening, in that as the tension went up and then was released, Russell thought that he had survived another bad moment, but instantly it started all over again. Finally the room was filled with a keen purple light, as though a fluorescent fixture had been turned on, and outside the air exploded with lightning so close that Russell felt the charge on his skin.

  The static charge built again. At the back of Russell’s mind, he felt mild curiosity about what it was like to be in a building that was struck by lighting. It was this curiosity, he knew, that was keeping him from real fear. As the sparkles appeared, producing a sense of the ominous that made it hard for Russell to breathe, he looked up at the top of the stone walls on which the rafters were set. The walls were a couple of feet thick, and that meant there was a flat place about two feet wide at the top. There, in that sparkling rip, in the chill on his skin, Russell saw the black snake.

  It was moving with a glistening slink, the coils of it sliding through the same places, as though they were going around pegs. Its skin had a silver cast that was set off by the golden sparks that crackled in the room. The snake kept going along the wall, not seeming to be headed anywhere so much as trying to get away from the place where it was. Outside, the air exploded, but the movement of the snake was constant: it didn’t flinch or stop or do anything at all but move along with that constant slinking flow, as though it wasn’t the sound that was bothering it, but another unnamed, unknown thing.

  Russell stood about ten feet away, and the first thing that came to mind was that the snake wasn’t nine or ten feet long. “It’s got to be twelve or fourteen feet,” he thought, as though putting a name or a number on this thing could help him with the other unknown presence, which he was too frightened to make sense of, or name, or even fully comprehend. He watched as the thing slipped down the wall, its tongue flicking out, tasting the ozone that filled the room as though the place were a power plant, rank with the sparks from the brushes of a generator. The snake went down the wall like a swaying, mesmerizing rope, and then slid across the floor, still not flinching when the explosions of lightning came outside or when the purple light pulsed through the room. It went across the concrete floor and stuck its head into the wooden frame that had been built around a sofa bed in front of the fireplace. Then, with a kind of legerdemain, it found a place to enter it, and Russell watched that slinking flow, the skin black and glistening, surrounded by sparks as it disappeared, all of its amazing length, into that wooden frame.
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br />   Then the purple light and the clouds vanished. The light of the sun came down with a soothing, fluid presence, and when Russell looked out the window, he saw balls of moisture on each blade, each one silver and perfectly shaped, as to suggest an essence of grass and light, like a handful of diamonds spread on a green cloth. For one horrible instant he was afraid that he had imagined the entire thing, and that he was experiencing the first symptom of a disorienting mental disease. Then he knew that this was utter nonsense, and that what he really was afraid of was not the precision of the way his grandfather spoke, such as when he had described this snake (which Russell had dismissed as the story an old man told to a young one to scare him), but rather that the old man had probably been right about the mesmerizing arrival of those events when one’s beliefs no longer applied, no matter how fiercely one clung to them.

  FRANK KOHLER

  “HEY,” THE GIRL SAID, “THIS SUCKER REALLY GOES.”

  The interstate stretched away in front of them, and Kohler glanced at the speedometer, which swept up to a hundred. She drove with her arms fully extended, like a racing-car driver, and Kohler reached down and flipped on the radar detector. The first thing he noticed was that his sense of time had changed, and that it didn’t seem to rush forward in a smooth arc, but now was made up of ragged bits that didn’t fit together. The future didn’t seem to have the depth it had possessed just a few hours ago, and this absence, which felt like a vacuum, left him straining for something that just wasn’t there. That was part of the difficulty. He wanted something that was gone, which was the notion of one thing naturally leading to the next in a long chain of the ordinary.

  She glanced over. “Am I scaring you? Something wrong?”

  He swallowed. “I feel sick,” he said.

  “You want to throw up? I can pull over.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have a fever?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’m just shaky.”

  “You mean like scared?”

  “It’s hard to describe.”

  “I know,” she said. “Like you’ve done something you shouldn’t have. Is that it? I get that all the time.”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s pretty close.”

  “There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said. “Not a thing. It goes with the territory.”

  “What territory?” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “Look,” she said. “There’s nothing you did that hasn’t been done before. That’s a promise.” She reached over and put her hand on his. “Does that feel better?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, sure,” she said. “There’s no mystery there.” She put her hand back on the wheel. “This is really cool. One-ten and gaining.”

  “It’s just a sick feeling,” he said.

  She glanced at the oil pressure, alternator, gas, tach.

  “Well, at least everything looks all right here,” she said.

  “I think you should slow down,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ve just been sweeping all morning, thinking about my troubles. Are we going to have fun or not?”

  “Fun,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Like being in a fast car.”

  He looked directly at her.

  “What are you on probation for?” he asked.

  “This and that,” she said. “I don’t want to go into it.”

  “Well, it couldn’t have been that bad,” he said.

  “Yeah?” she said. “How about possession of stolen property? Is that bad? Or possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute?”

  He shrugged. No. Not from his perspective.

  “No,” he said.

  She smiled.

  “And other stuff,” she said. “But they didn’t catch me for everything.”

  “Do you have a license?” he said.

  “Me?” she said. She giggled.

  The wolf-colored landscape slipped by, streaked with yellow from the last of the poplar and the occasional willow, which drooped over itself near the side of a road. He put his head back and thought that maybe, if he took a minute, he could come up with ... with what? As he sat there, he was uncertain what he was looking for. He confronted that oncoming landscape, which was different now, and it left him with the sensation of being lost. Where could he go? It was like being inside out: not that he didn’t know where he was, but that he didn’t have a clue where to go. Then he watched as she put out her cigarette.

  “So,” she said. “What’s really eating you?”

  He shook his head.

  “No?” she said. “Well, I told you about the possession-of-stolen-property rap.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ or ‘I don’t know if I should tell you’?” she said. “Say, have you got any money?”

  “A little,” he said.

  “Why don’t we pull off here and get a little something to drink?” she said.

  “I need to get away,” he said.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “A little trip to the seashore, courtesy of the booze manufacturers.”

  She got off the highway and pulled into the empty, dusty parking lot of a state liquor store. She tapped on the steering wheel and then looked over. Next to the liquor store was a motel, not part of a chain, but one that had been built here in the late seventies. A couple of cars were parked in front of it, and the effect was like a man who had only a few of his teeth. The girl looked at the motel and then at the liquor store.

  “I think I’ll wait here,” she said. “You know what I mean?”

  He got out. When he stood on that dusty apron, under that sky, he wanted to take action, or to find a way to produce one small point of reference that would allow him to ... then he came back against that disjointed sense of time, one thing being ripped from another, like the past and the future. He swallowed. Maybe the girl was right. A drink might help. Then he had the sensation of being exposed and obviously not belonging here.

  The store had metal racks for liquor, a cash register, posters about drinking and being responsible, and when he came in from outside, it seemed to him that he was just a guy who came into a liquor store, and the fleeting sense of the ordinary, which lasted only a few seconds, left him dizzy with an understanding of his new circumstances. What, after all, had he lost but the sense of living from hour to hour in a connected way? He took a bottle off a shelf and walked back to the cash register and paid the clerk, who was watching a basketball game on TV. He didn’t even look at Kohler.

  In the car the girl said, “I was thinking about getting a room.” She gestured at the motel. She took the bottle out of the sack, twisted the top off, and took a big sip. Then she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “If we drive around drinking like this, we’re going to have trouble. I’d like to take a shower. There’s no doors on the bathroom in the halfway house I live in. No privacy.”

  He sat there, staring directly ahead. He could see those shreds of money falling like leaves from those shaking fingers.

  He took the bottle and had a sip, and the only thing that he could feel, the only thing that seemed to exist in his life, was that hot, burning taste. Vodka. The transparency of it was mesmerizing, as though he could see, in the clear liquid, a hint of the unseen. Surely the liquor appeared one way, clear and harmless, but was really another. Then he took another drink, just to feel the burning presence, the heat in his face, and the long, warm descent into his stomach. He held out the bottle and she took it, her fingers touching his with a nice frankness.

  “Everyone looks at you,” she said. “Do you have a tattoo, do you shave under your arms? You know?”

  “What?” he said.

  “In the shower,” she said. “Where I live.”

  He glanced around. It was probably a good idea to get off the street.
Maybe then he could think for a moment.

  “I’ll get the room,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  He opened the door of the office, which was so small as to seem like a compartment on a spaceship. The counter was right in front of him, classic motel style: veneer paneling, a ballpoint pen in a holder, a form held by two little clips, ready to be filled out. A woman of about fifty was reading an In Style magazine and glancing up at a wrestling match on the TV on a shelf in the corner. Kohler had trouble remembering the number of the license plate of the car, his home phone, and his Zip code. He did the best he could and gave the woman three twenties. She took them and gave him a key and two bath towels and two washcloths. Then he came out and got into the car.

  “Maybe you should pull around to the back,” he said.

  “Anything you say,” she said.

  The room had two double beds, a greenish mirror, a lamp on a night-stand that was made out of veneer and had plastic knobs that were treated to look like they were metal. A painting was attached to the wall with screws. The girl came in with the bottle of vodka and sat down on the bed, where Kohler had left the two clean but threadbare towels. They both had a sip and she put the bottle on the floor while she lit up the last of the joint she had in her blue jeans.

  “Here,” she said.

  He took a long, deep drag and held it. Then he had a drink of the vodka and she said, “It won’t take long.”

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door. He heard the squeak of her feet in the tub, the running of the shower, and after a while the generic perfume of the soap, not quite lavender but something like it, came into the room, too. The smoke in the air, the lights here, which were probably seventy-five-watt bulbs, the sound of the girl’s voice as she sang a hymn in the shower, all left him trying to decide what he was going to do. The effort came at the cost of exhaustion, which made him relax a little. That, he guessed, was the upside of depression. Or maybe there was something else here, too. The girl made even this ugly room with the dim lights seem warm and lovely. She came to the end of the hymn and then the water stopped running.