Cruisers

by Craig Nova

  “O.K.,” she said. “You don’t need a warrant. Let’s go to the hospital.” She shivered. “Just let me get my jacket out of the car. O.K.?”

  “Sure,” said Russell.

  He walked her up to the car while she reached into the backseat, where the jacket was. She reached in from the driver’s side, over the floor so she could pick it up, and when she did, Kent Wilson said, “I didn’t say anything, Becky. I didn’t say a thing. You know that. Don’t you?”

  She just put on her jacket and turned to Russell and said, “Let’s go.”

  As Becky got into the passenger’s side of Russell’s car, Huntington arrested Kent Wilson. And when Wilson walked by Becky, he said, “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say a word. Becky ...” Then his voice trailed away as he was led back into the night, where Huntington had parked. In a minute, Huntington drove off up the road, the car accelerating into the distance.

  The hospital was in town, about ten miles away, and as they went, Russell could see just the last bit of light in the south, almost gone. They got off the highway and Becky watched the buildings go by, not saying much, although at the end she said, “I want to say something.”

  “Sure,” said Russell.

  “One day you wake up and you’re in the dark,” she said. “It’s that simple.”

  The emergency room entrance had doors that opened automatically, with an explosive huff, and inside Russell smelled the iodine and bandages and coffee. He sat in the waiting room while a doctor, a man of about sixty with a beard and gray hair, took Becky into an examination room. Russell tried to think of names. Maybe Clara. He had once seen it spelled Klara, which he thought was wonderful. Was there something like that for a boy? And then it occurred to him there was. Sandor. But he wasn’t so sure about that. Then the clicking of the computer keys, that smell of iodine, the squeak of a wheeled bed disappeared as he recalled, for an instant, the blood dripping onto ice. Then he thought about Becky’s vitality, and of the way the blue light had settled on them all. The doctor came out with a sealed Baggie in which there were twenty bags of heroin, which he passed over.

  Becky didn’t look at it, but she said to Russell, “Wait. Just wait. I want to talk to you. Can we talk in there?”

  She pointed to the waiting room, where the TV was on.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”

  The television advertised auto parts, lawns, cars, and a CD you could buy to learn how to use your computer. Russell and Becky sat under the TV, in the irritating flicker of it. Russell looked around, mystified, knowing he had missed something.

  “Kent didn’t know that I heard him talking about things,” she said. “But I did. That was the worst part. Feeling part of it.”

  She stood up and turned off the television.

  “Of what?” said Russell.

  She sat there with him, looking at him, in a way that was a mixture of a sexual invitation and something else, too, which was a variety of plea, although it would be hard to call it that precisely, since she was obviously shaking with rage, too. She looked at him for a while.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve never been so lonely.”

  She reached into her pocket.

  “Have you got a girlfriend?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “That’s good,” she said. “Here. This was in the back of Kent’s car.”

  She held out her hand and dropped into his a small gold ring, which described an arc, in aureate light, as it fell from her hand to his. It seemed so light as to be almost nonexistent, as he tried to feel the weight of a shooting star. He thought it was a present, a piece of jewelry that he was supposed to give to his girlfriend, but then he looked at it more closely.

  “Do you get it?” said Becky.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  “That woman who was found at the side of the road?” said Becky. “Kent did that. I heard him talking about it. That ring was hers.” She put her hand to her hair. “See what I mean about the dark?” She swallowed and said, “All right, let’s get out of here.”

  “Just wait for a minute,” he said. He got up and went to the triage desk and asked for a Baggie with a sealable top, and when a nurse gave him one, he put the ring in it and ran his fingers along the bag’s seal strip, pushing the bead of one side into the groove of the other.

  Later, in the parking lot of the barracks, he stood on the cold asphalt and looked at the window of the cruiser, which was covered with ice. He thought about the ring, the way it had glowed in his hand, the light touch balancing the fear he had been trying to face. The best thing, he knew, was to accept fate, but this was hardest, since what was fate and what wasn’t? He thought of fighting cocks he had seen once, years before, and the man who bred them and trained them had said the best were those that didn’t respond to anything, not to the noise around them in the pit, not to the crowds or even the other birds: these were the ones that caused the greatest terror. Had he learned this? Well, there was a chance.

  Now, in the parking lot of the barracks, he thought of that hotel room in Sheffield, the clothes that were hung in the closet, the worn bedspread, and his sense of the woman who had lived there evaporating like a volatile chemical. Well, at least she wouldn’t disappear into that realm of the forgotten. That was something. There would have to be evidence on the ring, the smallest fleck of skin, of fluid, a cell of blood. But even if they didn’t get something that way, they had Kent. He’d try to throw them some other friends, and then the friends would come up with more about Kent, when they found out that he had given them up. It wouldn’t take long even without the tests.

  Maybe, he thought, Zofia would still be sleeping when he came in and he could go upstairs and sit there for a while. Everything about the room, the slight rustling noise she made when she slept, the sour odor of sleep, the presence of the child that he could feel in the dim light, all of it delicate and certain. He would wait for a while, but then he would take off his clothes and lie down, too. It was Saturday, and later the two of them could go to the pool, where they could float in the hot sun, which streamed through the glass and smelled of chlorine. They could sit in the sauna, too, and feel the heat. When the rills of moisture ran down his back, she’d smile at him and say, “Tickles, doesn’t it?”

  About The Author

  Craig Nova is the author of ten novels. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Vermont.

  About the e-Book

  (AUG, 2004)—Scanned, proofed, and formatted by Bibliophile.