Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  “What the fuck was wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Russell. “Who knows?”

  “Is he dead?” said one of them.

  A man reached down and put his finger against Kohler’s neck.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, that’s something,” said the one who had asked.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  RUSSELL, OPENED THE SCREEN DOOR AND TOUCHED it with his fingers so that he could feel the coarse weave of it, which felt like the texture of a nylon stocking. He was determined to replace it with the glass insert. Then he went into the kitchen and felt the absence of Zofia: it wasn’t just a lack of noise, but the presence of something else, a stillness that was filled with what it is like to reach out for someone who isn’t there, and this was endless, since the impulse to find her came again and again and was answered with the same quiet oblivion. It permeated everything, and if he had gone to her closet and looked at her clothes, her absence would have been even more palpable. Then he sat down at the table.

  He thought of the explosions on the wood road, the dripping of the blood on the ice, and the misty light as it slanted down between the trees. His ears were still ringing from the shots, and that only made the transition from one place to another all the harder. But, at the same time, he didn’t want to move, or do anything at all. He waited. Once he put his hand to his face and smelled gunpowder.

  The first thing that announced Zofia’s arrival was the car coming into the drive, and when he looked out the window, he saw her pull up to the door behind the house and get out with a bag of groceries. Greens were sticking out the top, and the paper was brown, practical stuff, which Zofia saved. She had the bag in one hand and a gallon of milk in a glass bottle in the other. She always said she was reassured by the old-style glass container. She came up to the door, and he opened the inside one, and then they stood opposite each other with the screen between them. He pushed it open, and she came in, carrying the bag, which she dropped on the table along with the milk. Celery and lettuce spilled out, and she just left it there, putting one hand to her face. Then she tried to kiss him, but her lips were shaking and it wasn’t a kiss so much as a fluttering, wet touch. Then she put her hands on his arms, on his neck and chest, his head, going over him to make sure everything was all right.

  “You know, I thought ...” she said. Then she stopped, her superstition and her delicacy bringing her to an abrupt silence. She didn’t want to say, I thought you were dead.

  “Shot,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Or worse. I heard there was trouble up there halfway to Canada, and when I called, the dispatcher said you were up there and that as far as they knew, you were trapped ...”

  He swallowed.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  “And then a cruiser came up to the door, and when I saw it wasn’t you, I thought they had come to tell me,” she said. “But they said you were all right ...”

  She kissed him on the cheek and then they both sat at the table with their chairs pulled up to each other. Their knees were about a foot apart.

  Russell looked around the kitchen, and as he sat there he couldn’t shake the way the woods had looked. If he closed his eyes, the bland and stark blacks and whites, the grays and light grays, all came back, like something on the inside of his eyelids.

  “So, you’re all right,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “No.”

  “But not hurt,” she said. “I mean not injured ...”

  He shook his head. He wanted to be able to say something that made sense, or that could convey anything at all, but he didn’t even know for sure what had happened there: it was as though everything had opened up and let him have a look, but here it was hard to say what it was. He recalled the intensity, and when he did, he found that he was looking at her, blinking.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He looked at her again.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what was worse, that noise, that shooting, or the waiting, the knowing I had to do something, but it wasn’t obvious ... just, I don’t know ...”

  “That’s all you have to say?” she said.

  Her hands were shaking as she touched her mouth.

  “No,” he said. “I just need to think about it.”

  She nodded.

  “And there’s something else. I’m going to fix that screen door right now.”

  “What?” she said. “You’re going to do what?”

  “I’m going to fix that screen door,” he said.

  He stood up and went down into the cellar where they kept the glass panel to put in place of the screen, although down there in the dark, he stopped at the smell of dirt. Then he brought the glass back into the kitchen.

  “Do this some other time,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Look,” she said. “I want to know what happened.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “It wasn’t like something that happened at one moment and it was done. It was something else.”

  “Like what?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He put the glass panel down and opened the door.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just wait.”

  She sat there, shaking. He began to unscrew the tabs that held the screen in. She stood up, still shaking.

  “We’ve got to talk,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said. “I just don’t know what to say.”

  “Were you scared?” she said.

  “That doesn’t do it,” he said. “That doesn’t even come close.”

  “Then what comes close?”

  He shrugged and tried to undo the tabs.

  “Great,” she said. “That’s great.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “Please what?” she said.

  He stood there, undoing the next tab with a small Philips screwdriver.

  “Well?” she said.

  He took off the next one: it was important to get rid of the screen, of the thing that had been between them, and even though he knew this was probably not the right thing to do, it was all he could think of to get a moment’s relief. Zofia watched him and went over to the kitchen sink and picked up a glass from the sink and threw it on the floor, where it shattered with perfect symmetry, the rays of glass shooting out in all directions and skittering across the floor like ice. Then there was only silence in the kitchen. Russell stopped what he was doing and came over to the sink and said, “Is that what you want? You want to break things?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

  He picked up a tumbler and threw it on the floor, the glass shattering just like the first time, although he threw it much harder and the glass spread across the floor in those same rayed patterns, only going farther this time, hitting the half-open door and going into the next room, leaving the two of them in the center of those icy rays, which, even as they lay there on the floor, still suggested movement, as though somehow or other this was an ongoing explosion more than one that had come and gone. He reached for another glass.

  “Why stop?” she said. “Why not break everything?”

  She stepped back and bumped the table, where the groceries were, and as the table lurched, the glass milk container rocked back and forth at the edge before falling and shattering on the floor, the milk coming out in a white, almost beautiful wave, before splashing on the floor and leaving both of them standing in a pool of it.

  “Goddamn it,” she said. “Look what you made me do.”

  “Me?” he said. “You’re accusing me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She stepped forward in the milk and broken glass.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Please what?” he said.

  She tried to kiss him, but it was the same shaking half-attempt, trembling and not really a kiss at all. He put down the glass, but when he held her it was awkward with the body arm
or and the fact that they were standing in the broken glass and the milk. As they clung to each other, he said, “What do you want, what the hell do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Or I know. Or I don’t know.”

  She swallowed and put her hand to her face.

  “Well, which is it?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, I do,” he said. “You don’t have someone try to kill you without being sure of—”

  “Stop,” she said. “Please.”

  She leaned against him in the body armor.

  “O.K.,” he said. “All right.”

  But then it started again: he looked at the glass in the window and thought about throwing a bottle through it. He stepped through the mess and slammed the door, the house trembling with it.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  She put a hand to her face.

  “Well, are you going to tell me or not? What do you want?” he said.

  “I want ...” she said.

  “What? For Christ’s sake.”

  “I want to have this baby,” she said.

  He heard the ringing in his ears.

  They got down on the floor with towels that Russell brought in from the bathroom and started sopping up the milk, and when they had gotten most of it, they picked up the glass pieces, putting them into the brown bag that had held the groceries, the large ones going in first, although there weren’t too many of those, since the glass had shattered more than broken. Zofia cut her finger and then watched as the blood ran from it onto the glass, the red throbs of it making splashes there, just like bleeding onto ice. Russell got a dish towel and gave it to her and then started sweeping up the glass as quickly as he could, getting it into the dustpan and then into the bag, before going back and sweeping the kitchen, looking for the small bits of it and trying to get them all. Then he threw the bag in the trash, put the broom away while she sat at the table with a napkin wrapped around her hand. He pulled up a chair.

  He put his hand in hers and both of them sat there, not trembling exactly, just sitting there and listening to the house. It was cold and the furnace throbbed.

  After about a minute, Zofia looked up at the answering machine, which was by the telephone. The red light on it was blinking.

  “Maybe you better see who called,” he said.

  “Later,” she said. “I don’t want to deal with anything now. That’s something from this morning.”

  He got up and pushed the button.

  There was a beep and then a woman with an accent said, “Hi, Zofia, this is Katryna.” She was silent, just holding the phone. “I ...” Then she stopped again. “A friend is visiting from Russia and he’s going to give me the money today, I think.” She stopped. “So, I’ll have it for you.” Then she went back to waiting. “There’s something else. I was wondering if you could help me look for a job.” She was quiet again, obviously weighing whether Zofia could be trusted. “The railroad seems like a good idea. I have been thinking about it. At night, when the wind blows the right way you can hear the whistle of the engines. Anyway, do you know how to apply? Do you start at the union, and is there one for conductors?” She paused again. “It doesn’t have to be that, though. Anything would be O.K.” In the background someone spoke Russian. Then Katryna used a couple of phrases of Russian, too. “I’ve got to go,” she said. More Russian could be heard in the background. Katryna said into the phone, “O.K. Poka.” She laughed. “I can’t tell if I’m speaking Russian or English. Poka is Russian for, um ...” A man’s accented voice in the background said, “So long, see you, ciao.”

  “So long,” said Katryna, as though she were trying to memorize it. “So long.”

  ZOFIA WIRA

  ZOFIA WAS SURROUNDED BY SHADES OF WHITE, from cream to shell, from china to a hue that was like the arctic, tinted with an almost impossible-to-see blue. And along with the colors there were textures, too, where the dresses were hung, one against another, chiffon, cotton, chenille, silk, satin, and other fabrics she had never seen before. It was like looking at a selection of clouds. Her fingers touched the bone-colored material. She hesitated at the rustle of each dress, and as she stood in the cloud-like masses of white and the miasma of sizing, she felt the attraction of the color. Surely she was grown up and modern enough to be able to dismiss the dresses in this store as being antiquated and silly, and yet she found it exciting to be here, so much so that she blushed.

  The first thing she wanted was to look attractive, not sexy, not innocent, but womanly and beautiful in a way that could be felt as well as seen. And how was she going to suggest this secondary quality? She wanted to have a kind of luminescence, which she guessed would come from her, separate from the dress, although there were some shades that might be better than others. She was drawn to the purity of the color, but purity, as far as she was concerned, had nothing to do with innocence, since she perceived purity as being one and the same with certainty. Her lack of innocence allowed her to be intense in her desire to be married, and it was all the more pure for not being ignorant. She thought of this difference as being the critical one between girls and women.

  Then she went back to looking at the fabrics, wanting a dress made of cotton in case it got wet, rejecting satin as gaudy and not much better than chiffon. In the shades and hues of white, she detected something else, which was the scale of what she was doing, just as she was struck by a hint of mortality in all of this: the dress she picked out would be recorded in a photograph of her that would be shown to a member of a future generation, yet unborn, a granddaughter or great-granddaughter. What subtle message, what delight and pleasure, what restraint and beauty did Zofia want to send across time?

  She had considered wearing her mother’s wedding dress, which had been put away, but she had looked at it with a certain unnamable queasiness. The yellowed fabric was evidence of the passage of time and a staleness, too, in how people began to take each other for granted. She didn’t want a reminder of that.

  Then she continued from one dress to another, and as she touched the white material, as she held it up to the light and carried it to the front of the store where she could see it in the sun, she felt charged by possibility. The sunlight on a white cotton dress in the front of the store seemed to waver with a variety of brilliance, and as she turned away, she was more certain than ever of how broad the spectrum of possibility really was, from the whitest desert to the most shocking white of the arctic, from material that showed blood on a martyr’s robe to the glare that produces snow blindness.

  White, as far as she was concerned, was the blankness of the beginning, as cool as starlight and untroubled by ugly necessity. It had other associations, like the color of the belly of a snake, or the pallor of the albino, and yet these things detracted not at all from the gravity of the color. In fact, the ugliness of these hues, so imbued with deformity and danger, only made white more substantial and compelling.

  Then she picked up a dress, more simple than not, not low-cut, but trim around the waist and ribs, a little lacy. It wasn’t for a sedate bride, but for a woman who knew something about herself and was glad to have the chance to see if she was right about what she knew. In the color, as white as sand at midday in the Sahara, she realized that this hue was the opposite of everything she had previously been afraid of. This, of course, had been the speckled darkness of the night, the sparkling gloom that was Russell’s companion on the road, not to mention another quality, hard to describe but still noticeable. This emotional essence, which she thought of as a shadow, at once inky and ill-meaning, was at the heart of events gone wrong. The whiteness of the dress showed her defiance and her delight.

  She went up to the saleswoman, who had obviously spent one too many days with women who couldn’t make a decision.

  “I’ll take this one,” she said.

  Outside, in the street, she found Russell waiting, and when she came up to him with the oversized white bag, filled with the dress a
nd the pale fluff of tissue paper, he said, “Uh-oh, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, putting a hand to the side of her face, next to her eyes. “It just wells up like that from time to time.”

  “Oh,” he said. “But is there something wrong?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  “Then why do you get teary?” said Russell.

  “It’s just hard to describe. That’s all.” She reached into her handbag for a Kleenex. “Cut a girl a little slack, will you? Can’t you see when someone’s happy?”

  Both of them turned to the window of the store they stood in front of, where she blew her nose into a Kleenex and stood for a moment, taking a deep breath.

  “Well,” she said. “I hope you like the dress.”

  RUSSELL BOYD

  RUSSELL HAD A MONTH OFF AFTER THE SHOOTING on the wood road. He got up early, with Zofia, who was in a hurry to take her shower and dress, doing so with an air or perfectly controlled impatience. They had coffee together. That was it. She got up and put on her coat, the rustle of it a little sad, or so it seemed to Russell, but then he thought this was just a mood and that it would pass. She went out the door, and he sat at the table, looking out the window at the snow. It was winter, and snow had piled up around the house, and the fields of white were like a desert.

  Then the sound of her car disappeared and he waited while the silence came back. It arrived like a toothache. At first he noticed it only a little, but then more and more, and finally he got up and slammed the ice box door and sat down again, looking around as though the sucking of the rubber seal and the slap of the metal door would change the way things appeared. All he wanted was certainty. This was the first thing, but as he looked out the window, he realized that this was an impossible desire, and yet, as he admitted this to himself, he was only more uncomfortable.

  He didn’t like the idea of luck, either. What was certain about that? Luck offended him through its connection to the chaotic. Everything he had taught himself had been designed to avoid the surprise of the chaotic, and now he realized his error had not been what he had taught himself, but that he hadn’t really known what chaos was. Now he did.