The Current

by Tim Johnston

  And she looks again at the building, the large single window: the big gal sitting there as before, unquestionable owner of the sleeted-over wagon. All alone in there.

  “Shit,” says Caroline, and she’s out of the car and moving fast through the sleet and she can hear them even before she rounds the corner,

  “. . . there now, that’s better. See there, Bud? We’re all gonna be friends here.”

  The one talking has got his hand on Audrey’s face, and Caroline registers in that first glance how dark the fingers look against her friend’s pale face, as if they’ve been dipped in paint, or oil—white hand but dark fingers—and how light her friend’s eyes are, even in that shadowed space. Audrey’s hair is a dark mess, tossed by some roughness, and the man has got a knee between her legs and has pinned one of her arms against the wall but her free hand hangs at her side, as if by some terrible gravity—has he broken her arm? The man’s face is scratched and bleeding. Both men wear cheap high-crowned caps with curved bills and meaningless logos. Jeans and canvas jackets. Leather workboots, as common as old tires. The door to the ladies’ hangs open, gapped, does not shut on its own, she knows, nor lock convincingly from the inside, and there’s the foul stink of that room but also the stink of beer and cigarettes coming off the two men. And all of this in the instant before they see her—before Audrey sees her and they see Audrey seeing her.

  The one nearest to Caroline, the one standing back and watching, just has time to lock his eyes on what she’s holding up to him before the canister hisses its load into his face and he screams and flails backwards, clawing at his eyes—trips over his own boots and falls rolling on the concrete as if on fire. Misty discharge clouds the air, the intensely bitter smell and taste of pepper, and Caroline’s own eyes begin to burn. The other man—he is not a man, she sees, but hardly more than a boy, twenty if that, both of them—the boy lets go of Audrey to fling up his forearms, impressive reflexes, and the spray wets his sleeves—“Don’t you fucking mace me, cunt”—and he wheels and turns his back just as Caroline lets go another round. With her free hand she grabs Audrey by the coat sleeve and pulls her away from the door, away from the bitter haze, and Audrey in turn pulls at Caroline, but to no effect. Caroline isn’t going anywhere.

  “What did you say?” she says. She holds the canister head-high, aimed, but he keeps his face buried in his arms, his back to her. She blinks and blinks, the cold night spangling with the burn of the pepper, but she doesn’t move.

  “What did you say?” she says again.

  The boy just standing there, hunchbacked over his own face. The other boy squirming on his back on the concrete, blubbering about being blinded, Jesus Christ, you fucking blinded me, the wooden backscratcher near his head, strange thing lying there, like a doll’s arm torn from its doll.

  “I said don’t you fucking mace me, you fucking cunt bitch,” says the standing boy.

  “Caroline, let’s go.” Audrey is pulling at her. Pulling at her.

  “Why don’t you turn around and say that to my face, you slackjawed muppetfucker?”

  “Put that shit down and I’ll do more than that.”

  She sprays the back of his neck. He doesn’t move, but she takes a step away from the mist.

  “Bitch,” he says, “I swear to God . . .”

  “Caroline,” Audrey says, and pulls hard enough to get her friend off balance, and suddenly they are moving, they are stumbling, they are reeling toward the light, their bodies so slow and heavy and all they want is the light—the beautiful yellow light of the station! But when Audrey goes for the glass door Caroline grabs her once again, and there’s a brief struggle before Audrey looks in and sees: the woman who gave them the key, sitting at the counter as before, solving her puzzles as before, so pink and soft and alone in the cramped little store. And maybe you can get the door locked in time and maybe you can’t, but if you can’t, and the boys get in there . . .

  The RAV4 sits where Caroline left it, still running. Its doors fly open and slam again and the boys have not grabbed them, the boys are nowhere in sight as the RAV4 drops into gear, as it lurches and fishtails out from under the lights of the station, and the girls are in it and their hearts are slamming.

  “Are you all right?” Caroline yelling through her tears—the burn of the pepper. “Audrey, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Slow down!”

  “Do you even know where we are—?”

  “We’re two miles from the highway. Slow down.”

  “Who are you calling?” Audrey holds the phone in both hands—her arm is fine, why didn’t she use it?

  “The police.”

  “The police? What are they gonna do?”

  “Those boys might follow us.”

  “Fuck, I should’ve got the license—”

  “Yes, hello,” Audrey says calmly. “I’m calling to report an attempted assault.”

  “Attempted rape,” Caroline yells.

  “Yes, we’re all right now. What? Where are we—?”

  They are on the narrow and dropping two-lane road. They are halfway down the hill before Caroline thinks of the sleet, before she remembers the iron trestle bridge at the bottom—and yet when she applies the brakes nothing happens. Or rather, something very strange happens: the car turns quarterwise to the road and continues on at the same speed.

  “Caroline, don’t brake—”

  “What?”

  “Take your foot off—”

  “Audrey, shit—”

  They are briefly broadside to the road, and then they are backwards to it, looking back up the hill the way they’ve come—there’s their tiretracks carving a long black DNA helix in the sleet—one or both of them screaming as they come around again, and the steering wheel has come loose from the car, spins with meaningless ease in Caroline’s hands, and the whole world spins with it, the sleet angling crazily in the beams of the headlights—the snowy shoulder, the road, the trestle bridge all slurring by—until at last the car slips from the road and plows face-forward into the deep snow of the shoulder, the passenger-side wheels sinking into the ditch, and the car plows and plows through the snow, and it slows, and at last comes abruptly to rest, just short of the outermost ironworks of the bridge and on the very crest of the high riverbank. The two girls stiff-arming wheel and dash, looking out into empty space, their hearts banging. Sleet diving through the headlights on its way to a landing they cannot see, far below.

  “Caroline,” Audrey says.

  “What?”

  “Put the car in park, please.”

  Caroline puts the car in park. What they want is the lack of movement. What they want is stillness. It’s like that scene in the movies when the car totters on the cliff’s edge. Though the car is not tottering and it’s not a cliff, it’s a riverbank, but still.

  The cab is an aquarium, green-hued from the gauges, encased in glass. A heavy, underwater world. Even the air smells of it—tastes of it: plant life, silt, fish. Their heartbeats pulse between them on the currents, send messages one to the other on the green and conductive air. Fine hairs lift from Audrey’s head and sway like black cilia. The girls find each other’s eyes and find something—perhaps their screams, still ringing in their ears, perhaps the giddy rolling of their guts as the car spun round and round—to laugh about, breathlessly.

  “You fucking blinded me!” says Caroline, laughing. “Did you see that poor peckerwood?” And then she sees the headlights in the rearview mirror—two yellow lights descending the hill, unwavering, locked in, steady. As if this driver traveled some other kind of road, where the laws of physics still held.

  “Damn, that was quick,” she says, and Audrey sees the headlights too in the side-view mirror.

  “Caroline.”

  “What?”

  “That’s not the police.”

  Caroline looks again. “How do you know?”

  “They’re not throwing their lights.”

  That’s right: Audrey’s daddy is a sherif
f. Audrey has ridden shotgun through the Arctic hinterlands, has probably thrown the lights herself. Thrown the sirens. Let’s go get ’em, Deputy.

  Where is that sheriff now? Where is that daddy?

  Lying in his bed, dying of his cancer.

  Audrey remembers the phone and lifts it to her ear. “Hello? Hello—?”

  Headlights descend and pour their light into the cab, and when Audrey looks over her shoulder her face is a kind of light itself, moon-bright, and nearly all the color driven from her eyes, the pupils like black pinholes. She lowers the phone and says as quietly as anything Caroline has ever heard from another person’s lips, “Hold on, Caroline.”

  The headlights grow so near they are blocked by the RAV4’s tailgate, and still they flood the cab with light, the driver pulling onto the shoulder too but not as far over, short of the deep snow. There’s the sound of tires in the snow, and then there’s the sound of tires failing to stop in the snow, of tires skidding in the snow. And then there’s the bump.

  You couldn’t even call it an impact. A love tap, Caroline’s papaw would say—and the Mardi Gras beads click and sway, brilliant in the light. The tiny, multicolored rabbit’s foot. And it’s then, at the moment of the bump, the love tap, that the hawk and the squirrel come back to Audrey, flapping into her mind like something she once dreamed, a shrieking figment having nothing to do with real life, and she briefly thinks—briefly believes: This, too, this is not real!

  A love tap, a miscalculation—an accident, surely. And over the edge they go.

  How must this have looked to the driver who watched it happen: the RAV4 squatting in the deep shoulder snow one moment, solidly at rest, lit up in his headlights, the bags and suitcases of the cargo area, the heads of the two girls in the front seats—and then the bright oval of the passenger’s face as she turned to look back at him. Was it that bright sudden face that distracted him, that accounts for the failure to stop in time, the bump of machine on machine and the resulting, the unbelievable, visual of the back end of the RAV4 rising into the air as the front end dipped and the whole of it, machine and luggage and girls and all, slipped all at once out of view? Just—gone.

  Did the girls scream? Was there time? Was the outcome too swift and too certain for screaming? The forward tires locked in park, did Caroline Price slam her powerful legs at the brake pedal anyway? What thoughts fired in their brains as the car dropped, gathering speed from its own weight, flying nose-first toward the black surface of the river—a darkness and coldness too incredible to imagine. The black, smooth ice full of its own burning lights, its own stars. Did the girls in that span of two, maybe three heartbeats, find each other’s hands? Like girls who have done so all their lives did they reach out in the dark? Like sisters did they find and grasp?

  PART II

  2

  The daily paper that once landed on his porch in the morning, rolled up and slapping the porchboards in the dark as if to announce the new day, as if no new day could begin without that sound, had been stopped years ago, and still the days came, and the day’s news too by and by, though the only news he took with his morning coffee these days was the national weather from the TV, and that just so he’d know what to expect out there, though it rarely changed his plans or even how he dressed, and so he didn’t learn about the accident, those two young women in the river, those college girls, until much later in the day, when he made his way at last to Eileen Lindeman’s house to see about the smell she said was coming from the downstairs bathroom.

  The winter sun down by then, the end of a long day of small jobs, some in town, some out. Eileen Lindeman’s house was in town, on the east side of the river, and once upon a time he might’ve taken more care, might’ve parked the van a block away from the house, although it wouldn’t have stopped people from talking.

  Another lifetime, all that business, and anyone who saw Gordon Burke’s van in Eileen Lindeman’s driveway these days would know that Gordon was there to fix something in the house and nothing more. His story had changed too much for any other interpretation.

  The trouble was the seal—he told her that right off, showing her by rocking the toilet in his hands. The floor tiles had not been set level and so the porcelain base did not sit cleanly all the way around, and so the gasket never stood a chance. Just the slightest corruption to the wax and you had sewer gas leaking into your house.

  Brad, she told him—her ex—had set the tiles himself in one of his fits of home improvement. “Looked it up online,” she said. “Said anybody who could read could do it.”

  Twelve, thirteen years ago, that would’ve been. Brad Lindeman, the lawyer, had left her for a young woman lawyer up in Saint Paul, and of course Gordon’s wife had pulled pretty much the same stunt at about the same time—a banker, in her case—leaving him to raise a teenage daughter mostly on his own. Which, truth be told, was a relief at the time. Was a godsend to that house.

  He stood looking at the toilet, the tiles. Eileen standing just behind him in the small bathroom, her face framed in the vanity mirror.

  “You know what I’m gonna find when I lift this toilet?” he said.

  “A leprechaun?”

  “No, a two-dollar gasket about this thick that’s not even squashed. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”

  She was watching him in the mirror, the hand he raised to demonstrate thickness, and when he met her eyes he saw what was still there, if he wanted it—just a note, a reminder, just in case. She’d been the first, after Meredith moved out. Four years without a woman’s touch, including the last two years of marriage, unless you counted a woman’s fists as touching, a wife’s crazy little blows at two in the morning—your fault, always your fault that she was drunk. That she was sleeping with another man.

  He’d not been looking for it, not missing it; he had his work, his business, a sixteen-year-old daughter to raise. But Eileen had Brad’s money to spend: new water heater downstairs, new kitchen sink upstairs, new fixtures in the master bath . . . until finally there was no other reason to come over but one.

  You can park in the driveway, Gordon. There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. Is there?

  People talk, Eileen.

  So let them talk.

  What he meant was: they’d talked about Meredith. They’d talked about Brad Lindeman, and now they would talk about Gordon and Eileen, the two cheated-on leftovers running into each other’s arms, for Christ’s sake.

  He looked at the toilet again and said, “Shouldn’t be more than an hour, give or take,” and Eileen told him to take his time. She offered him coffee, a beer? but he thanked her no, he’d best get to it, and she smiled at him in the mirror and left him to it.

  The old wax ring came up with the toilet and peeled easily from the porcelain—greasy black but otherwise not much altered from its original shape and thickness, which was one-half inch, as predicted. He replaced it with a Harvey’s No-Seep #5, walked the bowl back into place, felt the wax compressing under it, tightened down the nuts, reconnected the water line and stood watching the tank fill, then watched the water flush down.

  He checked his watch. One hour, soup to nuts.

  He climbed the snowy risers to the driveway and got his tools stowed away. The stars were out, bright and thick. The temperature had dropped ten, fifteen degrees.

  At the front door he stomped his boots and let himself in, then stood on the small rug waiting for her to appear. She’d turned on the lamps in the living room. A light in the kitchen. The house was full of furniture, as if she was expecting a big crowd any second. She and Brad had never had any kids. There’d been a miscarriage or two, people said. Anyway it was now the house of a woman in her fifties who lived alone. Everything in its place.

  He took a step and poked his head into the kitchen. “Eileen?”

  A TV playing somewhere. Not downstairs, and not in the living room. The only other set he knew of was in the bedroom. He said her name again, louder. He didn’t want to cross the carpet in
his boots but he would not take them off. He pawed the soles once more over the rug and crossed the living room and took the two steps up to the landing where the master bedroom was. The smell there was partly her perfume and partly some other scent that was in her skin, in her hair, that made you think of the back of a supermarket where boxes of fruit were stacked and waiting. Or maybe it was because she day-managed the supermarket that made you think that. Anyway the smell was there . . . stronger when she unzipped her dress, when she stepped out of the dress in the lamplight, years ago, and stepped into your arms.

  He would not stay the night, he’d told her back then, because of his daughter. Because of what she’d gone through with her mother, and Eileen understood. But then one night when Holly had gone up to her mother’s for the weekend—Meredith sober then, supposedly, and living with some new man who was not the banker but a contractor with a young daughter of his own—that night Gordon had drunk too much wine and was just falling asleep when Eileen said she wanted to tell him something, something she’d never told anyone, not even Brad. And then she told him about the man who’d given her a ride. Fifteen, she’d been, and the man wore a tie and his car looked like her father’s silver Buick and he wore a wedding band and so when he pulled over she’d gotten in. But when they reached the turnoff for her house the man kept going, fast. Don’t, she said. You’re a nice man. She could tell by his face he hadn’t planned it, didn’t know what he was doing, or even where to take her. She knew it was his first time. You’ve seen me now, the man said, and she said, No, I never did. I never saw this car either, I swear to God. He looked at her and said, Do you believe in God? and she said, crying now, Yes, sir, I do, and the man slowed down. He pulled over and stopped the car. Sat there with his hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead. After a while, Eileen simply got out of the car, shut the door, and walked home.