"Motherfucker." The man stared at her a few seconds longer as if weighing her honesty on an invisible scale. He turned to the truck bed and leaned in. He returned with a metal baseball bat in his hand. "Where is that motherfucker? We'll straighten this out before you can say jack-shit."
Molly pointed toward the store. Now that she'd told someone she was shaking all over. She wanted to open the door, get out of the car, stay close to her rescuer, but she couldn't get moving. It was like when she was scared in the Mexican graveyard and Cruise grabbed her. She couldn't stop shaking to save her life.
The man had left her as soon as she indicated Cruise was in the store. He was over the curb and halfway to the door before Molly heard the voice calling him back.
"Hey, you!"
Cruise! He wasn't in the store any longer. He was somewhere behind Molly's head, she hadn't seen him come out. It must have been when the man went for the bat. She leaned out the car window to see. There he stood at the back bumper all coated in white fluorescent light. He looked deadly grim. Without looking directly at her he said, "You caused this, Molly. And I know you knew better."
The cowboy had turned at the voice. He stood on the sidewalk hefting the bat. "Little lady there says you're the motherfucker holding her against her will. That true?"
"I'm the motherfucker. Come and get me."
That was all the cowboy needed. He was moving down the curb, between the vehicles, heading for Cruise at a pace that would have frightened most normal men. All Cruise did was back away from the bumper a few steps so the cowboy could clear the passageway.
Molly got her hand on the door release and jerked it up. Locked! When had she locked it? She felt for the lock button and lifted it. She heard them talking behind the car, but couldn't hear what they were saying. She had the door open. Had her feet on the pavement, was standing free of the car when the battle began.
The cowboy swung the baseball bat so hard it whistled through the air above Cruise's head. He had ducked, danced back another few steps. They were in the middle of the parking lot. Molly turned and ran for the store. She hit the door so hard it crashed loudly against a stack of boxed l0W-40 Penzoil and sent some of the loose cans tumbling and rolling across the floor. The female clerk came up from behind the counter where she'd been crouching to cut into a carton of cigarettes. Her eyes were wild with sudden alarm.
"What is it?"
"Fight outside. Call the cops quick."
The clerk dropped the box-cutter. It clattered on the tile floor."Uh...uh..."
"Do it now! Where's the phone, for God's sake, let me have it!"
The clerk was too petrified to speak. She glanced to her left. Molly came around the end of the counter and found the phone sitting behind a display of gum. She had the receiver in her hand, her finger on the nine button to call nine-one-one when Cruise came through the door for her, his knife hand dripping the cowboy's new blood.
"Put down the phone, Molly."
"No!"
Cruise vaulted the counter and had the clerk around the neck before Molly could glance down at the phone to push the one-one that would connect her to emergency services.
The clerk screamed and the screeching of her panic filled the empty store with a sound that reverberated from the shelves.
"Drop the goddamn phone."
Molly let the receiver fall from her shaking hand. "Don't hurt her, Cruise, she didn't do anything."
"I won't hurt her," he said, breathing hard from his exertion. "I'm going to kill her. And baby, it's all your fault."
Molly lurched forward, reached for the woman's out-stretched hands, saw the woman's pleading eyes.
Saw Cruise take her by the hair and cut her throat with one swipe of the knife in his fist.
Saw the blood gush out and river down the green uniform with the white pockets, staining it all one shade of bright red.
Saw the woman's eyes again. The fear stuck there, imprinted there forever.
Saw the woman slump to the floor at Cruise's feet as if she were a toy animal who had lost its stuffing.
Molly stood over her, head hanging, tears falling onto the inert body until Cruise took her around the counter and out the door and placed her gently into the Chrysler.
As they pulled away from the store, Molly saw the cowboy in the headlight glare. He lay on his back, the tips of his boots pointing in opposite directions.
Molly couldn't see his neck, but she knew it was cut. She couldn't see the blood, but she knew it pooled beneath his head.
She couldn't bear to look at Cruise driving the car onto the freeway ramp, but she knew he was there.
She didn't think she'd ever get away from him.
#
Cruise crossed the state line into California. He drove fifty-eight miles to where 86 south crossed the freeway. He took the exit ramp.
"Mexicali," he whispered.
Before he reached the border crossing he had to bathe. There was blood all over the front of his clothes, some of it his.
He saw a side road leading to a subdivision of "ranchettes." The archway sign hanging over the gravel entrance way said "Hondo Estates." Cruise thought if these people really believed they could ranch on one acre, they'd buy anything. Although the per capita income for California was one of the highest in the nation, following only Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, the people living along the border barely scraped a living from the arid soil. They could call California the Golden State all they wanted. They could give the state motto as Eureka, meaning "I have found it.'' But those living in the Hondo Estates knew a different California. One of rattlesnakes and lizards, cacti and blue burning seasons that scorched the brain and cracked the earth into a jigsaw
effect.
There was another side road to the right before he ever reached the first boxy ranch house sitting woebegone in the distance. He turned down the road. The Chrysler bounced through the potholes, spewing gravel behind the tires. The shocks and springs squeaked in protest. The headlights bobbed up and down, highlighting a landscape that looked bomb-blasted. It was a desert without a rose, sand without a sea, low scrubby vegetation that clung to the earth without the encouragement of rainfall.
"Where are we going?"
Cruise heard the barely controlled desperation in Molly's voice. She thought he was taking her out into the desert to die. He could let her think that. Or he could still her worry. Because she had been so much trouble back in Yuma--it was her fault he was covered with alien blood--he decided to let her fret.
When he thought they were far enough off the main road, he stopped the car, turned off the headlights. The night was quiet the way it is out in the wilderness before dawn. The last time he had stopped this way the tornado wind and rain and thunder was deafening.
The silence was a welcome respite. Cruise felt he had been driving for eons. The inside of his head jingled and jangled from the aftermath of the Yuma killings. A muscle in his jaw twitched spasmodically. He put his hand there to hold it motionless, but when he took his hand away it jumped again, playing to its own symphony.
Molly had not said anything more. Bitch tried, he'd kick her out of the car, then kick her some more until she couldn't speak again.
He opened the car door. The overhead dome light came on and made him twitch. He stood outside the closed door looking over the roof into the far reaches of empty desert. He could see an occasional car passing on the highway. It was the early part of the morning, the late part of the night. Not many drivers going to and from Mexicali, Mexico.
He looked at the sky. Not a cloud. The stars so bright, so shining, they looked near enough to gather and pocket.
The moon riding low, a silver-white nimbus radiating a cold hazy aloofness that caused shivers to break out on Cruise's wounded arms.
He stepped away from the car and found the key that would open the trunk. He stood with his hands resting on the upraised trunk lid wondering what he had wanted. Oh, yes, the bottled water. He was sticky damp with
blood and he must get clean or he would go mad. He could smell himself. He gagged, swallowed hard, reached in for two gallons of the purified water. He set them on the ground near his feet, lay the car keys on the fender.
He leaned down and opened one of the plastic jugs. He stood again, lofting the jug over his head, feeling the chill thrill of water cascading down over his closed eyes. He stopped, lowered the jug. He had to get out of the clothes. He had to bury them once the water had cleansed him of the scent of old caked blood. He disrobed, slipping out of his shoes and socks, kicking the slacks from him, throwing the shirt from his back. He stood in his jockey shorts beneath the star-studded heaven. He saw the wet, clinging gauze bandages on both arms. He ripped at them until they were on the ground. Again he took up the water jug and poured it over him. When it was empty, he took the second jug, and used it to wash his chest, his belly, the wounds on his arms. The flesh there split open and clouded the water as it rolled down his elbows.
The first time he had murdered someone, two someones, he had to throw himself in the creek to make the blood disappear. It was the first and last time he had killed people he knew. He waited until he was sixteen. He had suppressed the urge for seven years. He had waited patiently since he was nine-almost-ten years old, since the day Orson and Edward tried to run over him with the lawn mower in the backyard.
He toyed with the idea of murder the way a cat toys with a mouse. He dreamed of it. Planned and plotted. Giggled over his secret at inappropriate times.
Since his brothers were older than he, his murderous thoughts were not carried out until he was sixteen and had come into his growth. The muscles of his arms and legs thickened and grew strong; he had reached most of his adult height of six feet four inches. He was just as much a man as either of his brothers. He knew he could take them.
His method was the knife, even then. He could have sneaked his father's shotgun from the bedroom closet. Or he could have put rat poison in his brothers' food. Or he could have burned them alive. No, dead. Burned them dead, dead. But in all his years of planning the deed he had never considered any method more just, more intimate, than a knife to the throat. With a gun you had to stand away from your victims. With poison you never laid a hand on them. With fire you had to manipulate too many elements, gasoline and matches. These were all oddly impersonal ways to take a life when a knife was a handy weapon, when it afforded him close contact, when it demanded that he really meant it. You could accidentally shoot, poison, or torch a person.
There was nothing accidental about cutting a throat.
He talked Orson and Edward into a fishing trip. Orson was nineteen, Edward twenty-one. They were both working at the sawmill, bringing home paychecks and paying their father room and board. They had girlfriends and cars and they thought Cruise--Herod--had long forgotten the little trick with the lawn mower. Cruise knew what they thought. That because they were children at the time it didn't matter, it didn't count. They thought he'd believe they wouldn't have hurt him anyway, even if Lannie hadn't intervened. It was a joke. A prank. A scary bit of nonsense.
Harmless play.
But Cruise knew he had escaped death by inches, by centimeters, by seconds. He had seen their faces. Their expressions from that day were forever emblazoned on his memory.
They meant it. It was not a childish impulse gone awry. They would have killed him while he struggled to free himself of the homemade grave.
Cruise had the knife stolen from his mother's cutlery drawer in the kitchen. It was the sharpest five-inch blade in the house. The handle was made of a dark wood dulled by years of use. There were three shiny steel rivets in the handle that he often covered over one by one with the pad of his right thumb.
They set out on a Saturday on another summer day much like the one when Cruise thought he was about to die. They threw fishing rods and two boxes of tackle into the rear of Orson's truck, an old l965 black Ford. They drove to a favorite fishing spot on the river, the truck bounding down a narrow back lane through the thick Arkansas woods.
Cruise let his brothers josh him about being "a squirt who grew into a giant." He let them horse around the way they aways did, popping the tops on cans of Budweiser, and talking about the pussy they were going to get off their girls that night at a dance being held in town. How sorry they were Cruise was just a kid yet and didn't know diddly about fucking girls. How sad it was he didn't seem to have the same kind of luck they did in attracting the opposite sex.
"You even got a pecker?" Orson asked, giving Cruise a knock on his arm to send him off-balance.
"Sure he does," Edward chimed in. "He's got a wood-pecker."
They thought that was hilarious. They thought they were stand-up fucking comics.
Cruise let them make fun of him. He let them bait their fishing lines and throw them into the gently flowing brown river. He let them lean back with their Lucky Strikes trailing smoke above their heads. And then he went to the truck to feel under the seat for the knife he had hidden there before the fishing trip.
"Where's Herod going?" Edward asked his brother.
Orson looked over his shoulder, frowned, turned back to the river. "Fuck if I know. Take a piss maybe. How should I know what the kid's doing?'
"Hey, Herod, you jerking off, all this talk of pussy?" Edward laughed like a jackal.
Cruise pretended not to hear. The hate now was so great it was like a barbed-wire fence around his heart. It squeezed and pierced him. He bled inside, the hate turning his blood black and rich as the dirt they had scooped around his neck in the backyard when he was a trusting naive boy.
He came from the truck, keeping the knife out of sight behind his right thigh as he walked toward them lounging on the riverbank.
A pair of redbirds flew down and rested on a bush near the water. A slippery bed of pine needles carpeted the incline to the water's edge, and Cruise had to walk carefully to keep from falling. A cooling breeze wove through the treetops, making the leaves and limbs sing in soft chorus. He drew in a deep breath of the green pines. Shifting spots of sunlight blinked through the forest and shone like a sheet of hammered bronze from the river surface.
"You gonna fish or what?" Orson asked, not bothering to turn to look at Cruise.
"He can't catch any goddamn fish, Or. He ain't got the co-or-din-ation," Edward said, laughing at the fun things he knew how to say.
Cruise had Orson by the neck, arching out his chest in struggle, before Edward knew what was really happening on the riverbank. Orson dropped his rod and grabbed for Cruise's strong, choking arm. "Fuck!" he screamed and that was all. He was holding his throat to halt the flood.
Edward scrambled onto his knees, moving toward them, hands out, Lucky Strike dropping from his wet lips, when Cruise finished with Orson and turned to bury the knife in Edward's stomach.
"Ah..." he said.
"What...?" he said.
And Cruise was on him, knocking him backward to the ground. Redbirds fled with a flashy rustle of wings while the sunlight played over the tussling figures on the slick bank as they rolled thunderously toward the dun-colored water.
Cruise had a time with Edward. He was older, he wasn't taken by surprise, he wanted very much to live and catch a fish and go to town for the dance and feel his girlfriend's breasts beneath her dress.
In the end Cruise half drowned, half cut his brother to death. Once they rolled down to the river, he pushed Edward's face under the water while cutting frenziedly at his exposed Adam's apple. Edward sucked in water and blood instead of air. He groped blindly, his fingers pressing over Cruise's face, trying to find a way to stop the killing, the cutting, the cover of water.
Cruise muttered insanely, "Die, you bastard, die, you son-of-a-bitching fuck, die..."
When it was done Cruise climbed to his feet and looked down at his clothes. The T-shirt he wore was soaked scarlet. Mud and blood and pine needles covered him from the cuffs of his jeans to the roots of his hair. He thought there could be no greater hell than to spend
another moment covered with the evidence of his crimes.
He dived headfirst into the river. He swam out to the center where the whirlpools formed. They carried him down-stream. When he climbed onto the bank, he had to push his way through tangled undergrowth to where his brothers lay silent and staring upon the muddy, bloody bank.
He buried them quite a ways from where they died, in the woods where no one ventured save a few deer hunters during season. He took their rods and the fishing gear to the truck. Then he found a place where he could drive the truck truck over the side into the water. He stood in fascination, watching it float out like a black ship to the river center before it plummeted under.
He walked home. His clothes dried on the way. It was late afternoon when he walked into the house. When his parents began to wonder where his brothers might be he told them the first whopping lie of his life. "They said they were going to town early for the dance."
When Orson and Fdward were never seen again Cruise's father inquired in town. No one had seen the truck. Or the boys.
The family fretted for a few days, but they didn't call in the police or fill out a missing person's statement. They had heard rumors that Orson's girlfriend was pregnant. They decided that was reason enough to abscond. Cruise thought they didn't much give a damn or they might have even decided, in their quiet talks in the bedroom at night, he had something to do with the disappearances. Either way no one made him pay for murder. It amused him to think, in the coming days before he left home for good, that killing was such an easy way to get things done. If the blood that covered him didn't bother him so bad, he thought he could probably do it again.
Later he found that he could.
He opened his eyes to the stars and felt a slap of vertigo that made him sway on his bare feet. He was standing in mud that squished between his toes, the empty water jug in his hand. He panicked, wondering how long he had been standing there dreaming of his brothers.
NIGHT CRUISING Page 19
