Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  He wished that he had a map in the car, since he could bring it in here and put it on the table that was screwed to the wall and plan which way to go. He had a credit card and five hundred dollars in cash. He guessed he could go to the bank and take out what he had, but was that a good idea? He didn’t know.

  She came out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around herself, tucked in between her small breasts. Here and there she had a mole. She sat down opposite him and took a drink, tipping the bottle up and making a long bubble in the neck. Then she opened the drawer and picked up the Bible there, which she flipped back and forth.

  “You know,” she said. “Sometimes you can get so close. You read the scripture and it’s all jumbled up, like poetry, and you can almost see it. But it just bleeds away.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “But, if you’re feeling bad, if you just grasp it, just for a moment, it helps,” she said.

  While she sat there in that cheap towel, her hair wet, her lips at the mouth of the bottle, he thought about the disorder of the kitchen, Dimitry’s chair going over backward, and then the explosion after that, all of it coming together in such a way as to leave him with a sudden, unexpected desire.

  “You know,” she said, “that was the first good shower I’ve had in months. I can tell you this. I don’t want to go back to the place I’m staying, or to that sweeping.”

  He took the bottle and had another drink.

  “Maybe we could go someplace,” she said. “Maybe we could just get the fuck out of here.”

  “Where would you like to go?” he said.

  “Out west,” she said. “Washington State.”

  “It would be nice,” he said.

  “Yeah, Cheyenne,” she said.

  “That’s in Wyoming,” he said.

  “That’s good, too,” she said. “You know what I’m saying.”

  He swallowed. When her red hair was wet it was dark, almost purple, and her skin seemed so white that it was close to the color of the towel.

  “You look pretty scared,” she said. “Are you afraid of taking a chance?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not that.”

  “When I’m scared, I just take the first step. That’s all. Break things down into small pieces. Do them one at a time.”

  She took another drink.

  “What could we do out there?” he said.

  “Start over,” she said. “Get a house trailer. You know. A job. What do you do?”

  “I fix computers,” he said.

  “That’s perfect,” she said. “They’ve got broken computers out there. I guarantee it. You can take that to the bank.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Give me your hand,” she said.

  He put it out, the fingers trembling a little. She took it and held it in hers and looked him right in the eyes.

  “Can you feel that? It’s like my fingers are buzzing.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Yes,” he said. “I can.”

  They sat there, just holding hands. He smelled the soap, the bleached bedspreads, and then they looked up in the mirror and saw the two of them together.

  She wants to go with me, he thought.

  “Now?” he said, his voice breaking a little. He looked around the room where everything seemed hazy, as though seen through heat on a road. Quavering, he thought, or is it wavering? He just sat there, trembling like a wet dog.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Why not? What’s the big deal?”

  “You mean it, don’t you?” he said.

  “I don’t want to go back to that group house. And you’ve got money and that car. Just the basics. That’s enough.”

  “Is it?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Let me tell you, I’ve been in so many things that had less going for them than money and a car that ...” She stopped and looked him over. “My best stories are about men, but it’s probably a good idea to keep my mouth shut.”

  He closed his eyes again and concentrated on the coolness of her hands.

  “Washington. Aren’t there big mountains out there?” she said. She hesitated. Then she looked right at him, leaned close enough to him so that he could smell her hair and that soap. “You don’t think I know you’re in trouble. Of course I do. So what? I’m in trouble, too.”

  “So what?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Come on. I’m saying we can do it.”

  She took the last of the joint and lit it and took a long drag and let the smoke go. Then she watched the cloud of it float away and vanish into the air of the motel room.

  “Right now,” she said.

  She dropped the towel and stood up, her skin white, her breasts small, and then she turned and went into the bathroom, where she got her clothes and put them on, wiggling into her tight pants. She buttoned up her blouse.

  “That was the best shower I ever had,” she said. “You sure you don’t want one?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Look,” she said. “You’ve got the money and the car. That’s cool. I can give you something, too.”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go and I’ll show you.”

  She stood up and looked at him with that half-mad smile and that funny red hair. When she spoke, it wasn’t so much that she made everything simple, but that she made it clear and resonant, and while she reduced things to the smallest elements of a problem, she didn’t appear to diminish them.

  “I forgive you,” she said. “Does that help?”

  “You don’t know what I’ve done,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll worry about that some other time.”

  They left the key to the room on the bed and went outside, where the light seemed very bright. The car was behind the building, and they got back into it, the girl behind the wheel, Kohler in the front seat. She started the engine and said, “All right. Pacific Coast, here we come.”

  He had the bottle and she reached over for it. Then they went down the two-lane road, through the middle of town, and got onto the four-lane highway.

  “Am I still going too fast for you?” she said.

  He stared straight up the road.

  She lifted herself up from the seat and reached into her pocket for another joint, which she lit with a cigarette lighter from her other pocket. In the small space the odor was very strong, and the smoke was like a scene in a World War II movie about a fighter pilot whose plane has been hit and the cockpit is on fire. She offered it, but he just shook his head.

  She glanced over at him, took a deep pull, and said, in little puffs of smoke, “Trying to figure things out, huh?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And you shall grope at noonday, as a blind man gropes in darkness; you shall not prosper in your ways; you shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you.”

  Then she exhaled.

  “I’ll tell you this,” she said. “Once you learn that stuff, you don’t forget. What I like is the scale of it, you know? Big, booming, like from way out there ... all jumbled, but almost there.”

  She took it up to a hundred and ten. The dials all steady, the landscape animated by the speed. It slid by.

  “I don’t know,” he said, feeling that burning sensation on his tongue when he had a drink. “Did you ever have a dog?”

  “No,” she said, “but I know scripture about them. I used to play the game with my dad. He’d say, like ‘dogs,’ and I’d come up with something. You want to hear one?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And I will appoint over them four kinds, saith the Lord: the sword to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy. You think I’m kidding? Jeremiah.”

  The speedometer held at a hundred and ten. The girl looked over and said, “Well, we’re going pretty good now. We’ll hit 84 and then we’ll g
o west. Maybe we’ll stop in Hartford for a map.”

  He nodded.

  “You know,” she said, “getting a fresh start makes you think. Like what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life? Like should I go back to school? Education is such a cool thing.”

  “It depends on what you learn,” he said.

  “Well, how about computer science?” she said. “Web pages and all that stuff.”

  He nodded. Yeah.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. She glanced in the rearview mirror. “Oh, shit.”

  Kohler looked back, too, over his shoulder. A state police car had turned out from behind a screen of trees, and had its lights on. Kohler looked at the flashes of blue. Then he turned back, put the cap on the bottle, and put it under the seat, as though that was all he had to worry about.

  “How fast does this thing go?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, we’re about to find out,” she said.

  The cruiser came along, not quite at the speed of the black car, but fast, and as Kohler looked forward, he felt the sense of pursuit, as though there was a long trail, invisible, that streamed back from the car. The numbers on the speedometer swept up to a height that Kohler had only seen in a dream. Was that really a hundred and twenty? The girl looked right ahead, her dyed hair against the window. The lights of the car behind them showed as a blue flickering in the sideview mirror. Kohler smelled the pot, and he could still taste the raw vodka he had bought. The car held the road in the next turn, although it seemed light, barely gripping the pavement. Kohler looked around, and there, in that moment, he had that teary sense of the unknowable, or only knowable by its fleeting, maddening presence: up ahead, to the south, the sun came through the clouds, just like a painting one would see in Italy, the masses golden at the edges, the rays piercing, and all of it left him sitting there, blinking, trying not to let it get away from him. He swallowed, and yet it still lingered, that operatic sense of everything, of a vast apprehension of ... he didn’t know, really, perhaps just the feeling itself, which he clung to in the face of disaster. And when he was thinking of that sensation, that state, he said, “Oh, please. Stop.”

  “Yeah,” said the girl. “Yeah. Shit.”

  She slowed down and pulled over. Kohler sat there, still blinking. He remembered Katryna’s expression when she looked him right in the eyes, not even noticing the dog anymore. “So, you saw,” she said. “Too bad.”

  The cruiser sat behind them for a long time.

  “What are we going to say?” said the girl.

  Kohler shook his head. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Oh, they are going to fucking kill me,” she said. “You know what my probation officer is going to do?”

  He shook his head again. He still had that sense of the beautiful and the ominous that was just beyond his ability to comprehend. Its scale was large and he was obviously in the presence of it, but that was all he knew.

  The trooper came up to the car. He had his gun drawn.

  “Stay in the car,” he said.

  Kohler saw that his name tag said TROOPER DEUTSCHE.

  “Do you have some identification?” he asked the girl.

  She reached into her pocket and took out a social security card and an expired driver’s license. The trooper took them both, and when he did, he looked inside at Kohler, too.

  “Is this your car?” he said to the girl.

  “No,” she said. “It’s his.”

  “Oh?” said the trooper. “Was there any reason to drive that way?”

  “No,” said the girl.

  “And you?” said the trooper. “You let her do that?”

  Kohler shook his head.

  “I asked you a question,” said the trooper.

  “I couldn’t ...” he said.

  “You couldn’t what?” said the trooper. “Have you been drinking?”

  “A little,” said Kohler.

  “Wait here,” said the trooper. “Don’t get out of the car.”

  He turned and walked back to the cruiser and got inside and picked up the microphone. Kohler swallowed. The girl started tapping the steering wheel with her open hand, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “That’s not my real ID,” she said.

  The trooper came back.

  “Get out of the car,” he said to the girl.

  She got out. As the trooper started to put handcuffs on her, she turned and started running. He grabbed her hand, but she got away, and then the trooper took a step toward her. He had his gun drawn. Kohler reached behind the seat for the rifle, and then the girl broke for the side of the road, where there was a field, beyond which rose a line of trees about a hundred yards away. The trooper looked at her and said, “Stop. Stop.”

  Then he turned and saw Kohler, who had gotten out of the car.

  “You don’t want to do that,” said the trooper. “You really don’t.”

  Below, at the edge of the field, the girl was still running, her hair bobbing in the otherwise dull landscape: it appeared like a bit of red yarn blowing across a piece of damp concrete. Above her a hawk wobbled in a thermal, its movement like anxiety itself. The girl had almost gotten to the trees at the edge of the field when she heard the rifle and felt the shock wave of it, too. The sound was deep, loud, and seemed to permeate everything, only to bleed away into a hum, which in turn vanished and left behind a new and ominous silence. When the girl heard the sound, the light became brighter and the colors more crystalline. Even the hawk seemed to flinch, wheeling over on one wing.

  She looked over her shoulder, one hand to her lips. From her perspective, she saw the flashing lights, the two cars, and one figure standing there at the edge of the highway with that funny-looking rifle. She turned back to the woods, running into them without looking where she was going. The brambles and cane, the brush at the edge were like a wall, but she ran right into it, falling once and getting up, her legs always moving, as though she was still trying to run even when she was falling.

  When she emerged on the other side of the woods, she saw a service road where an occasional car went by, and when she came to the edge of it, she waited, unable to make sense of what had happened. Something had changed. She knew that. Time had become short. She had the feeling of being in a tunnel. She sat down in the wet leaves at the side of the road, and as the moisture seeped into the seat of her pants, she kept blinking, looking around, unable to sit still. She could still taste the vodka in her mouth and the ashy tang of the pot. Then she looked around and thought that it would be best to keep moving.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  RUSSELL AND ZOFIA SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, just opposite one another, the sound of their raised voices slowly vanishing, and when it was finally gone they just sat there, hearing the dripping faucet in the sink, the ticking as the house cooled and the furnace came on with a throb. They both looked up at the clock at the same time. Then Zofia went to the sink and leaned on the faucet, but she only slowed the drip.

  “I guess you’re going to have to go soon,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We just go around and around. It’s not that I don’t want a child. You know that.”

  The furnace throbbed again, and outside he saw that the sun had left a film of light on the brown grass, a kind of pink film. There were places, here and there, where the tint came up against a blue-black shadow that was so dark as to look like a hole that had been cut into the ground.

  In the shower, Russell stood under the hot water and hoped that the noise of it would obliterate everything, and while he grasped at the soap, which kept slipping through his fingers, he found himself confronting the fact that he did not know what was going to happen, and each new event, each new detail, each time he stepped out into the wind of the highway required that he look at things as though he had never seen them before, even though they looked precisely like things he had. And when he walked out into the kitchen, what co
uld he see that was new, that would help him, or her? The sound in the shower got louder and louder and then he turned it off and stood there, hearing the drip from the fixture and feeling the cool air.

  “You had a call,” said Zofia. “From Mason. You know, the sergeant. He wants you to call right back.”

  Russell picked up the phone, called, and listened for a moment.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “What kind of shape is he in? Shit. Sure. Right away. Sure.”

  He put the phone down and went into the bedroom, where he started to dress, pulling the body armor over his head and fastening the Velcro straps, which stuck to themselves with a tearing sound. Zofia stood in the doorway, her arms crossed.

  “What was that about?” she asked.

  “Tony got shot,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  She looked past him and out the window.

  “Is he all right?” she said.

  “No,” said Russell.

  He pulled on his pants and took a shirt out of the box from the cleaners. The plastic sack came off with a whisper, and when he put the shirt on, it still had creases in the front. Often he thought that part of the discipline of being alert began with shaving closely, shining his shoes, making sure his hat was clean, too. Now, though, he just put on his clothes as fast as he could. Then he went out to the kitchen, where Zofia was now standing by the sink.

  “Did they get the guy who did it?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “They’re looking.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  She swallowed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Me too,” he said. “But not half as sorry as that asshole is going to be when ...”

  He stopped and ran the water until it was cold. Then he had a drink.

  “Look,” she said. “I just have a funny feeling about this. Maybe it’s being pregnant.”

  “I’ve really got to get going,” he said.