Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

  In the single streak of light, a belt of orbiting dust, Kevin lay on the couch under a blanket that smelled of mothballs. Colette and Pierrick continued working loose the boards until every corner was visible: stone floors and rafters spun with cobwebs. Pigeons cooed in a nest high above, and below, bird droppings spotted the armchairs and the dining room table. Weeds had grown up and died along the kitchen wainscoting, so Colette gathered them for kindling in the stove, blowing on damp logs until at last the mildew and mothball smell was overcome by a perfume of wood smoke. Kevin lay on his aching tailbone, shut his eyes, and listened to them claim the space. From a dark alcove, Colette cheered at the discovery of two unopened bottles of port.

  Returning from a bedroom, Pierrick announced that his aunt still paid some of the bills. “The phone works,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Don’ u’a’ phone,” said Kevin. “I’n nonna shranga you wi’ d’ cord.”

  “You lost too much blood, I think. You are delirious.”

  “His mouth hurts, don’t make him talk. He means there might be taps on all the phones back in the city, so everybody has to show a little discretion.”

  “Some real outlaws. One in the kitchen, one on the couch. I am surrounded.”

  Kevin sipped his port and dozed as he listened to their conversation at a wooden table, drifting in and out of anxious sleep. Every few minutes or hours they would rouse his attention with some adamant comment in French or English, and he would strain his neck to see them silhouetted beside the flutes of burning kerosene.

  At the first bright slash of sunlight through the east-facing windows, he woke with his shirt soaking wet. The room smelled of thick coffee and cinders. Colette and Pierrick had gone and left the door tapping open in a breeze. A rooster led a chorus of faraway dogs. Kevin wandered the house huddled in the blanket, bare feet on cold stone, then outside into light the color of dust and straw, the ground and fences netted with raindrops drying in the grassy heat, the landscape a bunched quilt of green and yellow squares, some fields of bare earth, hemmed with blotted bushes, and a sunken stream that twisted through the terrain like an indented scar. Crows perched in every tree, calling and suddenly flying upward in tornadoes of black. Such terrible disrepair: there were leaves from before the last snowfall now in a sticky, decomposed film over the pathway; and farther back, a decrepit chicken coop was filled with bristling dandelions, the wire chewed open, looking like a monument to some last stand between birds and foxes.

  The first day rushed along with the calm diligence of Colette’s chores. She gathered wildflowers for a wine bottle vase; cooked a zucchini frittata, which burned on the bottom but remained edible at its higher elevations; she hung up and cudgeled the dust from a faded Turkish rug; and she washed their shirts and underwear in a sink of coppery water, hanging them on the restrung laundry lines. Pierrick said that she had transformed overnight into a housewife; she replied that she had always done all the housework as a child, it was a form of prayer. Trailing smoke, Pierrick followed her all afternoon, refilling her glass.

  “And if you’re the housewife, who will the husband be?” asked Pierrick.

  “Someone who doesn’t ask a lot of questions,” she said.

  Kevin watched her legs move under the light dress. As she twisted to find her glass of wine, he was drawn to the curve of her waist and her dancelike movements. He hadn’t allowed himself to feel this way in a long time, and now that he did, anxiety attended each trace of longing. She blew a strand of hair from her face with a pouting lower lip, and Kevin recognized the gesture so vividly from her younger days that it made him nervous.

  The light faded and they heard baying dogs on a distant farm, so riled that Colette worried they smelled her unfamiliar cooking. To drown the noise, Pierrick found a monophonic radio in a drawer, and he left it on a crackling talk show filled with cascades of applause and static. Colette and Kevin passed a few hours playing hands of rummy. She reacted to every rustle and wince he made on the couch, checking his bandages, her fingers smelling of caramelized onions. Now that he couldn’t talk, she seemed desperate to understand whatever he might say. The mere act of reading his eyes meant they stared at each other and waited, taking deep breaths, and wondering. Kevin thought that she was falling in love with her own crude signature on his face.

  After the card game, they walked outside to see a broken shard of the moon. Kevin paced on the gravel, his knees still throbbing, wrapped in his blanket, while Colette stretched against the hood of the car. She was clowning for him. She made facetious pliés, a tipsy pirouette, hair swung loose, and then circled him with pas de course. She grabbed him around the waist and they moved into a tentative waltz together, hands interlaced and upright. But he winced at a stab of pain in his side, and she quickly helped him upright.

  “Oh, I’m sorry—honey. You must have some broken ribs.”

  The house was a flickering lantern against purple sky, a filament of smoke trickling up from the chimney. They noticed Pierrick moving through the bedroom with a lantern, searching for something in his bag. He began to dial the phone. Kevin loped into the house, grabbed the phone, and hung it up. Pierrick’s hands fluttering in exasperation, he shouted, “I was only calling a close friend!”

  Kevin tried to say that he didn’t trust Pierrick’s friends, and Colette needed to translate a portion of his garbled sentence. It was amazing to Kevin how much she could suddenly intuit his thoughts.

  “You are my friends,” said Pierrick. “So you don’t trust yourselves then.”

  “He’s right, Pierrick. We just need another day or two so Kevin can get his strength back—but if you start calling everywhere, we’ll have Interpol down here within an hour.”

  Kevin rushed to a pad and began scrawling his response in dull pencil. Colette took the note and said, “Oh, sweetie, your handwriting is as bad as your voice.”

  For the next hour Pierrick mumbled to himself and pretended to use the phone, placing mock calls through an imaginary operator, to presidents, kings, and commissars, until he was appeased in the kitchen by a new tidbit of conversation about his childhood. Kevin couldn’t stop thinking that something was wrong with Pierrick’s behavior, something too cavalier for a lifelong thief. He was a gossip, certainly—but he wasn’t foolish enough to spread rumors around the remaining thieves and mobsters in the city. So Kevin slipped into Pierrick’s room and rifled through his things. While Pierrick and Colette spoke in French in the kitchen, Kevin picked the lock on his suitcase, and filched a heavy day planner filled with scraps of paper.

  With the lantern, Kevin walked out the back door, heading to behind the chicken coop where he sat in the wet grass and shined the light over the book. Page upon page of ordinary, alphabetized names—for a while it appeared to be nothing more than an ambitious social document. But soon he came across some alarming notes.

  He saw Irina’s initials and address in a corner; he saw the name of Jirka’s restaurant in a long list of other businesses. A whole series of numbers followed, on first impression looking like a cryptogram; but Kevin thought they might be the numbers of accounts and safety deposit boxes. Had he followed Irina from her apartment each day? The details multiplied. There were lists of banks and money changers, names underlined, sparbuchen accounts and a series of dates. On another page he had sketched a tree of connections, Irina’s initials in the center sprouting off other names that Kevin didn’t recognize: Algerians, French, Russians, and a spattering of question marks throughout. It was a flowchart of money-laundering schemes and document trails. An ache ran through Kevin’s bones. He walked back through the house, returned the book to its place, and fell into the couch. Colette told him he was ghastly pale.

  He scrawled with a pencil: “You + me—talk. Important!”

  She looked at him with lowered, serious eyes, and said, “You’ll be able to talk a little better every day. Wait until you heal a bit more. Then tell me everything you’ve ever wanted to say.”

  Kevi
n stayed awake all night. The moon fell low enough to shine under the eaves and project a cross of shadows from the window sash onto the far wall. For an hour Kevin was so tense he might have attacked Pierrick if he had seen him wander to the bathroom, but he paced to clear his mind.

  Early that morning, just as the sun was coming over the lumpy horizon and roosters were crowing on a nearby farm, Kevin and Colette went for a walk along the road. His knees still ached, his lungs still burned, but she was patient and waited for him to catch his breath. She checked the gauze: he was bleeding a little, but it was clean. Kevin touched her face and thumbed the fledgling hair along her temple as she looked up at him with yielding uncertainty. They had made it a mile or so from the house along a road beside stone walls and budding trees. They stepped onto the damp grass as a black car gusted past them, and then they rested on a pile of bricks beside a field of corrugated dirt.

  “Kevin, I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I just looked at you that night, and maybe it was how afraid I was, or maybe I was just imagining—” When she paused, he grabbed her hand and put his fingers to her lips. She seemed to like this overblown gesture, though he needed it now simply to communicate.

  Feeling the movement in his stitches, he said, “Purrick. ‘S’an’inwhormant.”

  “Wait, slow down,” she said. “I can sort of understand you. Does it hurt to open your mouth all the way?”

  He nodded, then closed his eyes and concentrated, ignoring the pulling feel in his cheek. “He’s a rat.” His r sounded throaty and remarkably French without full movement of his lips. “He ratted ’em out.” He pointed back to the direction of the house, where a cloud of lit dust still swirled from the passing car.

  He made a series of clear gestures to explain: he unlocked a deposit box, he signed a check in the air, he dialed a phone, and made the sound of a siren, and for a sinking moment he thought that he was communicating like Melody.

  “Okay, let’s just be calm,” she said. “Did you see something, or is this just a hunch?”

  Kevin pantomimed scribbling into a book.

  “You saw his notes? Oh God. And you don’t have any doubts?”

  Kevin shook his head. The crows were moving in new patterns in the distance, flocking up toward a path of trees along the creek.

  “Oh my God, Pierrick. You son of a bitch—you fucking collaborator. I don’t believe this. Okay, okay—calm down. Let’s piece this together. Why would he do it? Maybe he was trying to get out of doing some time, I guess—maybe he’s been doing it for years. I never saw him actually steal anything, so maybe the cops support him. God, I’m never going to trust another human being again. Okay, okay—but the point is, he took us here, and I have to believe he’s at least trying to protect us. Is that completely unreasonable? Maybe he gave the police a lead—but it’s possible he didn’t intend for us to be directly involved. Otherwise he would have had us a long time ago.”

  Kevin clenched his face and pointed to the damp gauze.

  “Well, that’s true. So he used you. You led him through like the white rabbit. A tourist in his town.”

  Kevin nuzzled his finger into his forehead and made an imaginary gun.

  “Does that mean somebody is going to kill us? Or we’re going to kill him? I’m not trying to be contrary, sweetie—I’m just trying to make sure I’m picking up the right nuances. I was never any good at charades.”

  Kevin lowered his eyes and glowered at her; he pointed to his chest, then at her, and made a saluting wave toward the house and Pierrick. With a somber tone she said toward the house, “What is it about me that makes everybody run to the police? All right. It’s you and me, Kevin. We don’t ever let our guards down again. And you’re right—we go back, we get our things, we don’t say a word. Steal his keys or you hot-wire the car. We’ll get out of here and we’ll never look back. We’ve still got the old documents—maybe they’ll get us through some tiny little checkpoint in the Pyrenees. Do you really still trust me, Kevin, after all we’ve been through?”

  He shook his head, but opened the top buttons of his shirt and pulled out a chain. Dangling from the end of it was the engraved ring. Her eyes dampened, but she quickly blinked them clean and replied, “Of course you still have it. You’re a pack rat.”

  They took almost a half hour mounting the dirt road and descending through the farmland back toward the cottage, all the while Colette’s arm around Kevin, who was wincing with each step. She went over the plan a hundred times in a frenetic whisper: “We don’t say anything, we just leave. Should we disconnect the phones? Right, of course, we should disconnect the phones.”

  When they reached the cottage, Kevin paced slowly toward the house. Maybe it was only the sudden jolt of endorphins from the pain, but everything around him now seemed already to have the texture of a memory. When he noticed fresh tire tracks in the mud beside the gravel driveway, he knew. All around barn swallows filled the air now, a huge disseminating splash off a roof in the distance. The air was sopping with loamy earth, a tractor growled behind a smooth hill; he was noticing details with an electric clarity.

  When he walked inside the cottage, past the door partially open and rocking with the wind, he smelled fetid sweetness, metallic and carnal, and his stomach and chest revolted. He covered his nose and mouth with his shirt. Flies sat on the floor and along the ridges of chairs, some of them stalled under heavy air. The rooms had the shocked clarity of a crime scene. An open door, an end table struck slantwise, a mud print from a dress shoe on the rug.

  Pierrick lay on his side in the bedroom. Eyes open, mouth parted as if skewered on a thought, Pierrick looked almost ready to stand and greet him: it was amazing how intact the front of his face remained, even as the wall behind him had been sprayed with fragments, and the mattress was saturated like a cotton ball with blood, which dripped steadily onto the floor in a coagulant puddle. A lone fly crawled through the damp tendrils of his hair, skimming across a cheek to settle in the septum above his purple lips. It seemed a poor counterfeit of him. The skin was too gray, the bristly hairs on his face, growing like stubborn weeds, shaggier than ever in his life.

  The hinges creaked as Colette stepped into the house. Kevin rushed back to stop her, putting his hands up and trying to lead her back outside. He was surprised that she recognized the smell of blood so immediately. When she reached the frame of the door, she covered her mouth and squeaked, her skin turning livid, her breath in pounded gasps, until she walked out of the house shaking her head and repeating, “No, no, no,” as if it all were an argument she refused to accept.

  Kevin took stock. The rooms were murals of their fingerprints. One footstep of softened mud was the only possible image to exonerate them, and it was blurring slowly in humid air. How long before the body was discovered? How long before some farmer deciphered the frantic quality of all those distant, barking dogs? There was no possible way he could clean all the flaked traces of Colette and himself from the room, so he assumed they would be suspects as well as targets, and that the best alternative was to move fast and keep moving, now and forever. He thought of his father, and knew that he was right: there wasn’t any halfway in this life.

  Colette sat in the center of the weeded and muddy field beside a softened groove of old plowing. She had thrown up, everything tinged violet by last night’s wine, and as Kevin approached she hurried to cover it with mud. She tucked her hair behind her ears, streaking dirt onto her cheeks and ears.

  She asked, “Are these the same people?”

  Kevin nodded.

  “You’re awfully nonchalant, aren’t you?”

  He stood and offered her his hand. She looked back at the house, sighed, and brooded deeper into the ground, muddying her clothes. She tried to speak with an ethereal calm, but it came across as her imitation of aristocracy. “Part of me thinks he should be entitled to some kind of funeral—even if he is a rat. We’re not savages. He was a very ceremonial person. I know he lied to us about practically everything, but
I’d like to think he still enjoyed our company.” She covered her face, and when she emerged again from behind cupped palms, the coloring had returned to her cheeks.

  “Don’t do that, Kevin. Don’t just look at me like I’m crazy—I’m serious. We’re the only people left to pay our respects. I’m not the kind of person to just walk away from that. He deserves something more than being left in a filthy room.”

  She grew suddenly angry at some cold practicality in his eyes. She stomped back to the house, and when he caught her, she was approaching the phone like the ledge of a cliff. He ripped it from her hands and tore the cord from the wall. Colette turned up her chin and spoke to him down the length of her nose, seeming to have gone insane behind a character of superior gentility. “I am not going to subject myself to some sordid plot here. If you’re planning to dump the body in a creek, then count me out. I am a decent person and I intend to do things properly.”

  He was so angered by her false behavior that he seized her by the arm and began pulling her toward the door. Even in the midst of a scramble, Colette clawing at his arm and fist, shouting and straining to pull loose, Kevin noticed something grateful in her movements: she had taken to the fight with the quickness and drama of having expected it, perhaps even wanted it; and, as he manacled her wrists, while she kicked at him until he grabbed her around the waist and threw her into a bundle over his shoulder, legs writhing and hands scratching at him, he felt how much stronger she was than she was letting on, the wild power in her flanks and thighs. If she truly wanted to resist him, especially in his injured state, she could easily have done so; but there was a slightly yielding quality to her movements, as when a dancer allows herself to be lifted, and as Kevin trudged with her toward the car and she called him a thug, he nearly laughed at his sudden surge of love for her. He believed that he was freeing her from the burden of guilt, somehow, in the heart of this tangle, stuffing her into the car as she slashed fingernails and spread her legs outward onto opposite sides of the door (what an incredible ordeal trying to force a strong Midwestern woman into a Fiat), and he understood for the first time that, unlike him, unlike his father, Colette lived every day with the confused dream of somehow becoming an honest woman.