Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  He knew, though, that he had to make a lunch. If nothing else, he was going to have to eat.

  “I don’t want you to feel bad,” he said. “I don’t want anything like that.”

  “You’re not listening,” she said.

  “I don’t think this is the best time,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to go,” she said.

  “I’ve got to,” he said. “It’s my job.”

  “I’ve just got a bad feeling,” she said. “Don’t you see? I’m asking you not to do this. How often do I ask you, straight out, to do something that is important to me? Stay here.”

  “Not now,” he said. “We don’t have to talk about this now.”

  “No?” she said. “This looks like the perfect time.”

  He turned to face her.

  “I’m good at what I do,” he said.

  “So?” she said. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  He took bread out of a drawer and luncheon meat from the refrigerator, and began to make a sandwich, which he could eat in the cruiser. Sometimes he went out to lunch with other troopers from the barracks, but he knew there wasn’t going to be any of that tonight.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.

  “I’m asking you ...” she said.

  He stopped and opened up a package of ham, the marbled stuff slippery under his fingers. He dropped a piece and picked it up again and put it on a slice of bread. “I’m trying not to lose my temper, but there are times when you are—”

  “A bitch? Is that what you want to say?”

  She stood next to him, staring out the window. Then she turned to him and said, “Here. Let me do that.” She took the lettuce and the mustard from him and said, “Do you want cheese?”

  He put a hand to his head.

  “You didn’t answer me,” she said.

  “Yes. Yes, I want cheese,” he said.

  She slapped down a piece of cheese, and the sound hung there between them and bled away. He got out a brown bag and they put the sandwich in. He felt the pleasurable buzz on his fingers where she had touched them, and the sensation was like the lingering buzz from an emery board.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to talk like that.”

  He nodded.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Who did it?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He shrugged. “Heroin dealers travel in pairs. When the first car gets stopped, the driver of it starts an argument. Then the second car pulls up and the driver of it gets out and says to the cop, ‘Do you need assistance?’ just before shooting him.”

  Russell shrugged.

  “It could be something like that,” he said.

  He got to the screen door, which he had planned on replacing with the storm door insert this weekend, and then she was inside and he was just on the other side of the screen, with the mesh between them. He stood there, not moving a muscle, holding that bag. She looked through the wire.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “This is the last time I’m going to ask.”

  “I’m already late,” he said.

  Then she put her lips next to the mesh and said, “Be careful.”

  He stood in front of the cruiser, momentarily disoriented. Then he put the sandwich in the car and got out the tuning fork he used to calibrate the radar, doing so because he wanted to slow everything down, to do one thing that he had done before and that gave him the feeling of doing the right thing in the right order. Then he got into the car and pushed the sandwich over on the seat and saw that she had turned away from the door and gone inside. He could see her through the window with her arms crossed under her breasts as she stared out into space.

  FRANK KOHLER

  THE DOOR OF THE CRUISER HAD OPENED WITH A click. Kohler had gotten behind the wheel, putting the rifle next to him, its butt on the floor, its forearm leaning on the edge of the passenger seat. It took a little fumbling to turn off the flashing lights, and as he put his hands under the dashboard, pushing one switch and then another, he heard a click as the lock on the rack that held the shotgun behind his head opened. He toggled the switch back and forth, hearing that sound, which came and went with a cold finality. He left the rack unlocked.

  The radar was on the dashboard, and below it he saw a microphone and the radio. A wire mesh cage was behind him. The voice of the dispatcher gave a number and what sounded like an abbreviation for a town. He didn’t know what that meant. If he responded, what would he say?

  He went north at a steady seventy-five miles an hour. Occasionally he came up behind another car, and for a while he just followed it, and then there was a moment when the driver in the car ahead looked in the rearview mirror, saw the cruiser, and got out of the way. Kohler accelerated, letting the cars slip by, one after another. Then the woman’s voice came on.

  He was glad to be away from the black car, which was filled with the smell of the cheap vodka and the cigarette the girl had been smoking, but there had been something else, too, about the interior of the black car. It was confining, and just sitting in it was a punishment of some kind, which had, at its heart, his sense of being in the place around which everything had collapsed. It was the locus, or so Kohler thought, of pressure. It didn’t take long, however, for that sense of being at the bottom of everything to come into the cruiser, too. He thought the voice of the dispatcher produced this atmosphere, as though she was a part of a chorus, and what she said was an ongoing, steady commentary that he couldn’t understand. It reminded him of the language that Katryna and Dimitry had spoken, and so he reached down and turned the thing off. The quiet of the car was instantly soothing, and for a minute he just drove in it, but then the silence began its slow, steady change from relief to something that was confining and inauspicious.

  What seemed odd was that he still existed at all. When he looked around, everything was at once mundane and still filled with meaning, and when he tried to take a deep breath, if only to calm down so he could think, the relief was momentary, since he went through it again, the girl running away, his hand as he reached for the rifle, the soles of the trooper’s shoes, which were visible as he lay at the side of the road.

  He knew that the smart thing would be to pull over and to get out of the car and find a way to turn himself in. To make an appointment to do so. An appointment. How could he use such a word? And he knew he wasn’t going to do any such thing. As he drove, all he could think of was the scale of what had it in for him, something keen and malicious that he saw even in the vista ahead of him. The woods and sky seemed dangerous, and he knew that giving up was a matter of surrendering to what had so perfectly singled him out. This was a matter of faith. He swallowed and tried to look around, to calm down, and when he did so, he found himself trembling and feeling drained and barely able to keep his eyes open.

  He got off the highway and turned toward the Green Mountains. They were attractive to him, and he drove west, thinking it over.

  He remembered Katryna when she had made tea in the afternoon, sitting there at the table and sipping from the cup he had bought her, her eyes far away, as though she were seeing Moscow, the river with lights smeared across it, or those Soviet statues of the New Man and the New Woman.

  The wood road was about five miles from the main highway. It wasn’t much to look at, just two ruts that ran uphill into the trees. Kohler slowed down and looked at it, and then turned into it, slowly climbing along the hard earth, which was mostly frozen. He didn’t know where he was going exactly, although what he thought was that he would park the car at the end of this road, or as far up as he could go. Sooner or later the cops would come up here, looking for the car.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  RUSSELL SAT IN THE CAR IN A PULLOUT AT THE entrance to the valley. He took off his hat and put it on the seat while he looked ahead. This country was full of these places to park, mostly next to a stream that, in September, was so low that all you saw was a collection of b
rown and blue rubble. Here the stream turned away from the road and ran along the edge of a floodplain, which was fertile land, although there wasn’t much of it. You could see where it ended by the hills on each side of the valley. Russell put his hand to his head and looked at the house that was not too far from the road, about a quarter of a mile beyond where he sat.

  The house was sided with clapboards, but they hadn’t been painted in a long time, the effect of which was to make them seem scaled with peeling paint. The house was two stories, and it had a porch. The roof was made of slate. The overall impression of the place was that it had been a lot better off forty years ago, and now was slowly disappearing. A barn behind the house was missing shingles, and the cupola on the top, where pigeons still lived, looked as though it was going to go next winter.

  Russell knew that Deutsche’s parents were home. A lazy pennant of smoke rose from the chimney. A woodstove had been attached to it in the kitchen, and Russell recalled the afternoon when he had come for a turkey dinner, when both the kitchen range and the woodstove had been going and the house had been warm and fragrant with sage. The valley and particularly the house looked different now. Now it looked, in the harsh landscape, like an outpost that was about to be overrun.

  He knew that he didn’t have much time. But he sat there looking at the smoke and the pigeons that circled around it. Having to do this, to tell Tony’s parents about what had happened, left him with the sensation of becoming something he had never wanted to be. He had hated events that left people with the sense of being overrun, whether it was someone beating someone else, or the slower but equally devastating work of heroin. He had always put himself on the other side and had been glad to do it, too. But having to go up to the door with this news made him feel as if he had become part of what caused the trouble.

  He started the engine. He knew that slowing things down wasn’t going to do much. Even so, he found himself trying to gain an extra minute before pulling up in front of the house and going in. The drive wasn’t paved, just dirt with puddles that had frozen and that reflected the silver-gray sky. In one of the puddles, as he stopped the car and glanced down, the pigeons were reflected as they flew around the house in fluttering, anxious-looking movements. Russell sat in the car and looked at the kitchen door. One light was on. The others, in the living room and upstairs, were out.

  He got out of the car and put on his hat. Then he walked from the cruiser to the small wooden porch where there was a screen door that hadn’t been replaced yet with a glass storm panel. It made him think of Zofia as she had stood on the other side of the screen when he had left, that faraway look in her eyes. Then he opened the screen door and knocked a couple of times, before he looked through the glass and saw that Deutsche’s mother and father were standing in the kitchen, both of them turned toward him. The woman wore the same brown sweater that buttoned up the front, a gray skirt, and her hair was in a serviceable bun. She had one hand to her lips. Her husband stood in overalls, which he didn’t really need for work, since they had sold their herd of fifty cows ten years before. The husband came to the door.

  “Hello, Russell,” he said.

  Russell nodded and came in, holding his hat. He felt the room change, as though he had brought in a presence that, while invisible, still made everything seem a little washed out and a little heavier. He swallowed and looked from one of them to the other, feeling that room as it seemed to become someplace he had never seen before, not in the arrangement of objects, but in the way they felt.

  “Come in,” said Mrs. Deutsche.

  Russell closed the door, hearing the suck of it in the frame.

  “We were just going to have tea,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to have some?”

  Mr. Deutsche leaned on a chair, his hands gripping the back of it so hard that Russell could see that the nails of his fingers were white under the pressure. Mrs. Deutsche didn’t wait for an answer. Russell was certain that they knew—that his coming to the door at this time of day had been enough.

  The kitchen still had the odor of breakfast, a mixture of oatmeal and toast and maple syrup, all of which seemed to bleed away now into the stone of the chimney, into the walls that needed painting. Mrs. Deutsche held the teapot up to the kettle, putting it over the steaming spout, and then she turned to Russell and said, “Did you know that the most important part of making tea is to warm the pot?”

  “No,” said Russell. “I didn’t.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Deutsche. “You’ll remember now, won’t you?”

  She tried to smile, but it was as though the skin of her face was heavy. Even so, she managed it and said, “And then you add a spoonful of tea for each person and one for the pot.”

  He watched as she did this, the water making a sloshing sound as it went into the pot. Russell tried to concentrate on the sound, as though it could protect him. Mrs. Deutsche put the pot and three cups on the table and then they all sat down.

  “It takes about five minutes to steep,” she said. She put one hand up to her hair and patted it, to make sure it was in place. Mr. Deutsche sat down and looked out the window. In the distance the pigeons flew around like shreds of dirty cloth. Russell put his hand on his cup and moved it around, but the grating sound made him stop. A log collapsed in the stove. The house made little noises, as though in the wind. Maybe, thought Russell, maybe I could tell them how much I liked their son. He looked at one of them and then the other. No, he thought, they just want to drink tea, to do anything they can to keep what I’ve brought into the kitchen away, to make it slow down.

  Mr. Deutsche closed his eyes.

  “Oh,” he said. Then he shook his head.

  Mrs. Deutsche poured out the tea and gave a cup to her husband, who took it and cradled it in his hands to feel the warmth, even though it was scalding. Russell took his cup. Mrs. Deutsche held hers, too, and blew softly across the surface. Russell looked at her pursed lips as she blew, and remembered when he had seen it before, in a house where a woman was having a baby without being able to get to a hospital. Her lips had been pursed like that when she panted to control the pain. Mr. Deutsche took a sip of the tea.

  Russell bit his lip. The silence in the room was like a physical malicious thing: if anyone spoke, they would have to say things that no one wanted to say and hear things no one wanted to hear, and yet the silence sat right there, demanding, making it hard just to drink the tea. Russell swallowed and had the wild impulse to tell Mr. and Mrs. Deutsche that Zofia was pregnant, but then he stopped it, swallowed again, and had a sip of the tea. It was strong and good. He realized that what he wanted to do by telling them about the baby was to share some hope. It was a small thing against the way the house appeared there, perched on that landscape, like the scene of a crime.

  “We just tried to make ends meet here,” said Mr. Deutsche. “You know, we were almost able to make a go of it. When Tony was young.”

  “He didn’t like to work on the farm,” said Mrs. Deutsche.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Deutsche. “That’s right. It’s hard work.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Russell.

  “No,” said Mrs. Deutsche. “Don’t say that. Don’t.”

  Russell took another sip. They finished the tea. The house creaked, and outside, on the road, a car went by, the sound of the tires hissing on the cold asphalt.

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding.”

  Mrs. Deutsche shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “There’s no misunderstanding. The sergeant called before you got here. He said ... he told us about Tony.”

  “I’m glad you were the one to come here,” said Mr. Deutsche. “At least you had the sense just to drink your tea.”

  He put a hand to his face.

  “How’s your girlfriend?” Mrs. Deutsche asked.

  “Fine,” said Russell.

  She nodded, putting a hand to her face.

  “I think you better go,” she said.

 
; He stood up and she did, too, clinging to him. He could feel the thinness of her under the old sweater, the trembling against him, even through the body armor. Then she turned away.

  Outside on the porch, Russell looked at the frozen puddles in the driveway and walked to the car, where he threw his hat onto the seat. Then he thought about the tea, which he wished he had never tasted. He started the car and turned around, and at the main road he went back toward the highway.

  FRANK KOHLER

  KOHLER SAT IN THE CRUISER. WHEN HE GOT OUT, as he did from time to time, he looked back the way he had come. There were ruts in the wood road, which were the color of clay, and between them rose a high center strip on which a fringe of grass grew. About a hundred yards back, the road curved around a hill and disappeared. He guessed that soon he should walk back that way and climb up on the hill so that when they came in here, looking for the car, he would be behind them, and uphill, too. The police would be going for the sound of the car, which they would hear because Kohler would leave the radio on, good and loud. He had decided on that, anyway. When they approached the car, he would be behind them. They wouldn’t know he was there.

  He got back behind the wheel and turned the radio on again. A lot of it was in code and numbers, but every now and then he heard his name, that people had reported seeing men who looked like him. Well, he thought, that was fine. By the time they got up here, they would be more tired, less alert. He had the shotgun and the rifle. He also had a uniform that had been left in the car, fresh from the dry cleaners, and a trooper’s hat that was in the backseat. Kohler turned the radio up as loud as it would go, and put the trooper’s hat on his head. If they saw him, up there on the hillside, they would think he was a policeman and hesitate before shooting one of their own. That hesitation would give him an advantage. I’ll do everything, he thought, to make this more confused, more difficult, more uncertain.

  As he put the shotgun on the roof of the cruiser and reached in to get the Mannlicher, he had the sense of making order out of this mess. He was going to climb uphill to find a place that had a clear view of the wood road and that was far enough away from the cruiser so that he could hear them coming, even with the radio on. There, up the hill, he’d feel the weight of the rifle and the shotgun. The light would be behind him when he put the forearm of the rifle against a tree to steady it, and, of course, a lot of other things would occur to him as he went along. He had had it up to here with vagueness and uncertainty and his inability to understand what was wrong. The weight of the rifle was ballast against all that. What he was interested in, he realized, was a moment of clarity, which he anticipated as golden heat and super brilliance, more platinum than gold, but whatever it was, it would be bright, clean, and filled with something knowable. He would emerge from the shadows he had lived in for years.