by Peter Craig
As he drove away, she recovered quickly to say, “We should leave an anonymous call, at least. Okay—from a train station. I just hate the idea of leaving him there.”
Kevin glanced at her, seeing her wide, terrified eyes, then he touched her shoulder and shook it with camaraderie. She smiled bashfully, looked back out the passenger window, and replied, “How badly did I hurt you with that little tantrum?”
He put both hands over his heart, throwing his head back melodramatically, while she reached across to steady the wheel.
THIRTY-TWO
That afternoon, Colette made an anonymous call to the police from a provincial station, reciting the address in French with a phony German accent, then slipping back onto the train just as it began moving again.
Struck with sudden colds, they slept three lost days in Lourdes, near the border, over a courtyard of street minstrels. A nearby church tolled its bells, blending with the first insistent thumps of a disco in the hotel’s lobby, a metronome in the floorboards that continued until dawn. They ate crackers, cheese, and antacids; they drank cheap picnic wine and a carton of orange juice. Colette seemed almost to welcome her wretched state, wandering in loose pajamas, blowing her nose like a bagpipe, moaning in bed amid the crumpled piles of tissue. She broke into tears while brushing her teeth, and when Kevin held her, the crying gave way to a fit of sneezing against his bare chest, apologizing with each emergent gasp of air.
On the third day, Kevin wrote a postcard to his father and asked her to fix his spelling.
I wanted you to know that everything has fallen apart for me out here. The Old Country isn’t any picnic either. But I’m still alive, still on the move. I’m traveling with a woman you remember well. I know your blood will boil to hear it, but she’s my last real friend, and probably the only thing I love in this world—except for maybe your sorry ass.
Stay tough, your son
Colette’s eyes flickered around the card as she proofread it, and when she looked up, she was flushed in her cheeks. From under his collar he reeled up the chain and swung the engraved ring like a pendulum.
Her bottom lip lay caught between her teeth. “We were such kids.”
He unclasped the ring and started to slip it onto her finger. Her hands shook as he did, and she began to cry with a face that looked tortured and angry. He stared into the expanding holes in her eyes, and said, in the first tense words of his returning voice, “You know everything I want, and I know everything you need, Colette. So what if we’re dangling our feet in the grave? We’ve been through hell together—and it’s nothing. Nothing we can’t handle.”
That night they catnapped a few restless hours clutched together in their clothes. The room smelled of coal smoke. She woke around midnight and for a long time they lay on their backs facing the water-warped map of the ceiling. She was breathing unnaturally, with shivers that curled her back and lifted her shoulders. They moved closer in slow advances, until finally they were tracing their hands over each other, in a way that seemed to Kevin like two blind people trying to decipher each other. He had imagined this moment with her so often, and although there were qualities that he had guessed correctly, he found himself most stirred by the details he had dreamed wrong. The bouts of childlike playfulness he had expected, the giggles with foreheads touching and hot blasts of air, the way she made a fuss over fishing off his socks and flinging them away; but he was more surprised by the moments of cathedral quiet, how slowly and steadily they kissed, teasing and goading, fleeing and returning; and he was amazed that she was so bashful, covering her breasts as he undressed her, forearm across like a sash until she could hide herself against him in a warm press.
There were shifts between playful and determined, chasing and quiet reunions, slowing and speeding, until a serious current overcame them, and their bodies grew tense, and they seemed to make each other hungrier. With her legs wrapped over him, feeling trapped in a closed circuit of voltage, he was wincing, unable to wait but waiting, as they rolled again and she perched upon him and leaned forward to bury him in a curtain of fallen hair. He peeked sideways to see in the mirror the beautiful tensing machinery of her back, then once again watched the quivering of closed eyes. He was startled by the way she appeared to be communing with loss and sadness, until gradually it seemed to him a breed of wisdom, a sudden sorrowful clarity at the center of anything real, which overwhelms as it passes. The body is too tender to endure it long enough. Pleasure becomes heavier than pain. The skin turns electric, protecting and imprisoning, and everything falls an increment farther away from the touch; until all that’s left is a room, like a shell, quiet, where two people are sealed under a hot sheet, in a mystified pact: she sniffles, while everything for him is one layer down, underwater, past where light can reach, and once she has stopped, and he watches the faint oncoming dawn in the windows, believing her coiled body against him is consolation for the end of the world outside, he asks why she’s upset; and she replies, “I just suddenly had this sinking feeling—that I wanted to go home.”
THIRTY-THREE
In a windswept village deep in the mountains of northern Spain, Kevin found the local priest sleeping in a small office off the stone church of San Pedro El Viejo. It was a sweltering July afternoon, and Kevin already had sweat stains expanding across his tuxedo shirt. Like the church with its dusty stone floors and its altar of wavering candle flames, the priest seemed to be an unassuming little man. He was taken aback by Kevin’s excitement and faltering Spanish. Tengo que casarnos, mi mujer y yo— he needed to be married in time for the six o’clock train.
The bride-to-be was already causing a sensation around the tiny village, hiring local girls and seamstresses to help put the finishing touches on an ambitious dress, which she had sewn herself during the last eight weeks of difficult and continuous travel, hiding it and laboring over it in youth hostels and cheap hospedajes. In cluttered marketplaces of saffron, dried peppers, and North African jewelry, she shopped for Spanish lace, pearls, and silver—never boosting even a single sequin, because she had sworn that the wedding would be the first entirely legal day of her life. The thought of this elaborate mystery dress put a knot in Kevin’s stomach, but he was determined that she have her moment in this picturesque village, far from access roads and Interpol green notices.
The priest tried to find his glasses. It was summertime, the season of tourists hiking the nearby pilgrimage trail of Santiago with backpacks and sunburned knees, and he seemed accustomed to their photo ops and intrusive requests. He was undoubtedly wary of his church being used as a novelty site for a bizarre Eurailer, especially one with a gigantic incriminating scar on his cheek.
Clearing his throat, he asked if Kevin or his fiancée were Catholic.
Speaking in a hybrid of the two languages, Kevin explained that his girlfriend had been baptized Catholic in Michigan, then raised in a Lutheran foster home, and that he was a devout, practicing agnostic.
Kevin didn’t catch every word of his response, but the priest appeared to ask why they wanted a church service if those were their beliefs.
Kevin thought about this for a long time, sweating in the hot and cluttered office. When he looked up at the priest to answer, he started crying for the first time since he’d been a boy. In English, he confessed everything. He was a pickpocket, a con man, a hacker, a phreaker, a liar, and a thug. Never in his life had he felt anything like guilt or shame, only pride in his work, a desire to improve and diversify; but he had been scared one night, nearly killed, and he had seen the death of a friend and traitor, the effect of which was to make him feel the tug of violence in acts that he had once considered sport. He could no longer pick a pocket or cut loose a fanny pack without feeling that he had nearly murdered someone; and he found it progressively harder to lie to the faces of open and well-meaning people—not because he admired or understood them, but because they seemed somehow vulnerable, fragile, easy targets for the real wolves out there: because he sympathized with them now�
�God only knew why. Maybe he had been frightened enough to feel pity for the frightened; or maybe he had been chased long enough to no longer think as a predator; or maybe, more likely, he believed for the first time that he had something in his own life worth protecting: “She’s crazy and impossible and I’m losing my mind—but I know if I lost her somehow, there’s nothing in the world that would be worth more than a trinket.”
The priest nodded along at the waves of Kevin’s speech, with a nervous expression. When Kevin finished, he knew that the man hadn’t understood a single word. But for some reason, he took Kevin’s hand in his, patted him on the fingers, and agreed to perform the ceremony.
At a quarter past four, the pews were filled with the local villagers, children giggling and play-fighting, a great buzz of expectation about the fugitive American wedding in their town. The church doors burst open in a wash of sunlight, and out of the clouds of spiraling dust, Elizabeth “Colette” Olsen walked down the aisle carrying a bouquet of orange blossoms, in a sprawling dress of ivory silk and inlaid pearls, with a fifteen-foot-long veil that ten laughing young girls carried behind her. The vows were read in Spanish, and they answered, “I will,” until in a gust of spontaneous festivities, they were cheered out of town, amid the throwing of rice and improvised confetti, escorted all the way to the empty station, where on the platform the bride closed her eyes and threw her bouquet, which soared backward into the air, and landed on top of the ticket vendor’s booth.
When the train arrived they settled into their compartment, Colette looking buried in a cloud of white lace, Kevin now drenched with cologne and sweat. They lowered the window and waved. Colette blew kisses to the children who ran after the train. Then, as they gathered speed past the ringing bells of the intersection, the last flags of drying laundry, out into the scrubby landscape of ranches and hills, she collapsed into her seat by the window and made a tired and pleased humming sound.
Kevin said, “We’ll be legends in that town.”
Her face was slack with relief as she stared out the window, sunlight and shadows passing over her like a shifting spotlight. Her eyelids looked drowsy and Kevin hardly recognized the peaceful expression.
“When do we have to make San Sebastian?” she asked dreamily.
“Tomorrow at nine,” he said. “We’ll have a few hours to spare. But we’re traveling under the names of …” He searched in his bag for the passports, worrying suddenly that he’d lost them in the rush.
“How did you get that priest to agree? That must be the biggest trick you’ve ever pulled off in your life. And our real names too.”
He felt the passports down among his clothes and exhaled deeply. “It’s a miracle.”
Three hours later, she had fallen asleep with her head in his lap. The sun vanished and the moon passed with them through a chain of interlaced lakes. He stroked her hair, stooped over and guarded her like a treasure. Through a village, the train nearly grazed house fronts, squares of light falling away slowly enough to see the blinks of home interiors, snapshots of a hundred lives, the flashing of tables and chairs, vases and windowpanes, old women pulling curtains shut, gardens and doormats, brick pathways; then past bells and waiting farm trucks, sidewalk trees slowing, until with an earful of depressed air another train punctured the space beside them, and everything became a wild montage of windows, a flicker of silhouettes. Colette jolted wide awake and blinked up at him as if he were a floating ghost.
“What is it?” she asked. “We’re in trouble.”
“No, no,” he said. “Not yet.”
THE THURSDAY NIGHT SHIFT
Whatever Melody had coated her fortune cookies with—Seconal, triazolam—Daniels began acting drunk by around seven-thirty that night, slurring his words during a bitter harangue about how much his father hated him. At a little after eight o’clock, he climbed onto the neighboring bed, yelled at the television, and nodded off to sleep. Whoever had masterminded this escape, they had picked a potent chemical, for while Daniels snored, roseate patches developed on his cheeks.
Less than ten minutes passed before an orderly came into his room, head down, carrying a bedpan. After three strides he knew it was Colette. Out of the bedpan she unfolded a jumpsuit that had been tightly packed, and she laid it out across Kevin’s legs. It looked to be the uniform for a medical-supplies courier.
“The shifts are changing right now,” she whispered, as she began disconnecting the IVs from his wrist, pulling back the sheets. “Listen close, honey, because we’re behind schedule. Get in this uniform. Out in the hall—turn right, go about twenty steps and pick up the clipboard and the yellow ice cooler marked ‘Live Organs.’ You’re delivering a heart for a transplant. You’re going to have about thirty seconds to get downstairs, down to the lobby. Go to the front security desk, and say there must have been a mistake. That’s it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Trust me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I’m here.”
“Colette, I don’t even know if I can walk.”
“You can do it. I found your father, by the way. I’ve never seen him so genuinely beside himself—so I spared his miserable life. You go where the security guard tells you and we’ll be there.”
As she was leaving and he was climbing painstakingly off his bed, he called to her, “Colette? It’s not really somebody’s heart in that package, is it?”
“No, sweetie. It’s nobody’s real heart.” Then she slapped her hands melodramatically across her chest and, through fake tears, said, “Except mine.”
BOOK FIVE THE FINAL SCORE
1988
THIRTY-FOUR
At the border with Canada and the port of White Horse, Montana, in a cramped Toyota Cressida with the windshield wipers swinging at a downpour of cold rain, Kevin and Colette gathered their documents and whispered their plans. A horse trailer idled ahead of them, taillights flaring. “We’ll be fine,” said Kevin. “He’s not even going to come out of the booth. Look. There’s probably a meth lab in that trailer.”
When they pulled ahead, the customs agent looked at their Wyoming licenses—easier to counterfeit because they still lacked holograms—and came out of his booth in a green poncho, shining a flashlight over their staged display of backpacks, camping gear, and crumpled-up maps. Colette placed her hands against the dashboard, as if preparing for a collision, and Kevin reached forward and touched her fingers. She relaxed, held his hand; they began a conversation, first as a mere diversion, about a real moment when Kevin was terrified by a hissing raccoon in a rustic motor lodge bathroom. Like every performance now in front of cops, customs officials, or suspicious onlookers, it became an exercise in positive energy. She rested her head against him and they proclaimed their happiness; and Kevin only lamented that they never quite felt the same purity, the same staunchly unwavering optimism when they were safely alone.
The customs agent waved them through, and they were in good spirits, passing under the black clouds, searching through the gravelly radio stations. “We’re home. We should get a bottle of champagne,” said Colette. “If they have one in this neck of the woods.”
They found a desolate roadside motel between a billboard covered with snowmobiles and a neon sign that advertised HBO, partially obscured by pine needles. They were still high from their successful border crossing, and they made love on top of the motel comforters, lounging for a while afterward in the darkness, listening to truck tires slice past in the rain. When Colette took a shower, Kevin went out to find groceries—and possibly champagne—feeling that inevitable downshift in mood as their real situation became unavoidable. She would be genuinely upset that he couldn’t find any goddamn champagne, and he would be demoralized by the state of his career. They were down to a few hundred dollars.
Certainly, there was a practical reason why they had done so little work during their long meander across Canada: their goal was to reenter the States, and this required as little noise as possib
le. They had wanted to hide, and they learned to scurry from town to town as unnoticeably as mice. But their long hiatus was also the result of Colette’s fairy-tale idea of marriage, what Kevin considered her own specific form of lunacy. She believed that matrimony itself was purifying, and that any descent back into criminal activity would jeopardize all other aspects of their life together. Kevin found it difficult to go “cold turkey,” but it was as if one binding contract made it impossible for Colette to think illegally. She would pout and cry and harangue Kevin if he so much as devised a simple lottery scam.
She could startle him with the depth and intensity of her gratitude if he preserved this illusion; so his entire life became dedicated to the idea of “going clean,” as if it were something far more magical than the ditch-digging or lumber-stacking jobs he was likely to find. Of course, the problem was that a talented con woman had a certain standard of living. There were only so many weekly-rate motel rooms she could tolerate before they needed the Hilton in Vancouver. Where was the money supposed to come from? Colette didn’t seem to care. In her mind, she was an honest woman now, and her husband was obligated to devise a working scheme, both legal and lucrative; and when he criticized this, she responded with her own catalog of perfectly reasonable problems—her inability to find a job in retail because they were always on the move, his obsessive and imprisoning jealousy of her whenever she went out to pound the pavement—until Kevin believed that marriage was that rare scam in which both sides considered themselves the easy mark.