by T. C. Boyle
“Hold,” he shouted. “I’m on hold. And we need gas. Didn’t you—?”
“Nine-one-one,” the voice came back at him. “What is your emergency?”
“A thief,” he said, and he was shouting still, he couldn’t help himself. “A theft. Identity theft. He’s—he stole my girlfriend’s, my fiancée’s, identity, and he’s here, we have him in sight, we—”
Dana’s voice, fluting in its highest register, clambered atop his: “A red Mercedes. Tell them a red Mercedes!”
“What is your location?”
At first the question didn’t register. Location? “We’re in a car,” he said. “On the freeway, the I-80, and he’s—we’re running out of gas…”
“You’re running out of gas?”
“Yes, and he’s—”
“Sir, this is an emergency line only. I’m sorry. You’re going to have to hang up immediately.”
The connection went dead, the exit blew past. A crazy thought of battering the Mercedes off the road flew in and out of his head, something he’d seen in a movie, a dozen movies, but there was no one to paint out the wires here, and the blood on Dana’s forehead was real. “How accurate is this gauge?” he demanded, flinging the phone back at her. “How many miles do we have? Does it go right out or is it just a warning and you get twenty miles or something? Do you know?”
She said, “What?”
He repeated himself slowly, and she said, “You mean the gas gauge?”
He nodded.
She was leaning over him to check the gauge for herself, to get the angle on it, when the Mercedes suddenly swung out into their lane and he was so startled he nearly let go of the wheel. Had he seen them? Was that it? Bridger tapped the brake, drew back until the car behind him sped up to pass. But no, the guy wasn’t looking in his mirrors, wasn’t doing anything but staring straight ahead except to dip his head toward his wife’s, as if they were conversing. He didn’t have a clue. They were okay. Everything was okay. Until they ran out of gas.
When it happened, he was almost surprised, expecting miracles, the loaves and fishes, the Hanukkah oil, good triumphing over evil despite the odds. The car suddenly seemed to waver, as if a gale had swept up off the roadway to fling it back, then the engine choked and died and he was coasting to a stop on the shoulder, as powerless as one of the lizard lords of Drex III.
For a moment he just sat there, his hands trembling on the wheel. Beside him, her knees drawn up to her chin as if she were bracing herself against some unseen force, Dana gave him a long slow look that cut right into him. Disbelief was there—that was part of it; he felt it himself. Disappointment. Sorrow. And something else too: disgust. She looked disgusted. With him. He couldn’t suppress a quick flare of anger. “What? What is it? You want me to get out and run him down on foot?”
The gash on her forehead had begun to crust over, a yellowish contusion swelling beneath a ragged badge of dried blood. Her hands snapped at him: No, I want you to get out and get gas. And then she was pointing to a building in the near distance, on a side street that ran parallel to the freeway, a gas station, Shell, and how far was it? A quarter mile?
He’d already cracked the door—he was already on his way—but he couldn’t resist coming back at her because he was as wrought up and furious as she was and how dare she blame him, as if this whole mess was his idea, as if he were the one who should have seen to the maintenance of the car when it wasn’t even his in the first place. “What’s the point?” he said aloud. “You think he pulled off to wait for us? You think we’ll ever see him again? Huh? Do you?”
A truck blasted by, sucking all the air with it, and the car shook on its springs. Her face twisted. Her hands flew at him and she was signing angrily and forcing out the words at the same time: “Shit,” she said, “shit, shit, shit! Just go, you idiot, you jerk, you—” But he was already gone, the door slamming behind him, and he hadn’t walked ten feet before he broke into a sprint, as angry as he’d ever been—murderous, crazed—but for all that glad to be out of the car and away from her.
The whole thing—the whole fiasco—cost them maybe twenty minutes, half an hour, he couldn’t say. He jogged back to the car with a gallon can that was as heavy and awkward as a cannonball, and then he left a strip of rubber burning on up the freeway to the next exit so he could double back and fill up the car, and he had to ask her for cash because they wouldn’t take his credit card and he was in no mood for an argument. And then, without discussion, without debating whether they should call the cops with a description of the car, fill out a police report, drive to the hospital to see if she needed stitches or sit down to some breakfast, some nourishment, bacon, eggs, Tabasco, coffee for Christ’s sake, they were hurtling up the freeway, uselessly, hopelessly, and the Jetta hardly rattled at all when he hit a hundred and left it there.
Neither of them spoke. He felt strangely calm, beyond the law, beyond the grasp of the pedestrian drivers in the slow boats of their sedans and convertibles and pickups as he blew by them, shedding their quick startled looks of bewilderment and outrage, hammering the car from one lane to another, using one pedal only. The day was clear now, sun glancing off the hoods of the line of cars and trucks stretching off into infinity, the roadside a blur of golden-brown vegetation and the searing intermittent flashes of aluminum cans hidden in the weeds. He was sweating. His fingers ran loosely over the wheel, attuned to the slightest variation, manipulating it with all the finesse and superior hand-eye coordination he brought to his PlayStation, and what game was he playing now?
Twenty minutes into it, twenty minutes after he’d pinned the accelerator to the floor, she spoke for the first time since they’d left the gas station. And what she said was, “Take this exit—U.S. 50, to Lake Tahoe. He’s going to Lake Tahoe, I know it. I feel it. Pull off, pull off!”
Why would he go to Tahoe? He was running, and he was on I-80, heading east—he was going back to New York, obviously. To hide out. To get away from them. They’d been to his house, they’d knocked on his door, and now he was running. “That’s crazy,” he said.
Her face floated there, inches from his, and it was clear that she wasn’t concerned about reason or logic or even likelihood. “Just do it.”
“Shit, why not just use a Ouija board?”
“Do it.”
He took his foot off the accelerator and it was as if they’d been flying ten feet above the roadway and come crashing to the ground. Everything was moving in slow motion. Cars began to overtake them. Signal lights flashed. People’s faces cohered behind planes of glass. He was on a highway, he could see that now, the sun in his eyes, tires rippling beneath him, the air conditioner wheezing in his face. An SUV slid by on the left and two kids, brother and sister, waved to him from the rear window as their dog—some sort of terrier that looked as if it were wearing a false mustache—popped up between them. And then, and he didn’t know why, he merged with the traffic heading for Tahoe.
And what was it—luck? Fate? A fine-tuning of the music of the spheres? He couldn’t say, and all his life he’d remember the moment, because when they came up on the first exit, right there, as if it had been parked purposely in front of the family restaurant with a FOR SALE sign scrawled on the side window, was a Bordeaux-red Mercedes, dealer plates attached.
Four
MADISON SLEPT the whole way to Sacramento, past San Quentin and over the bridge, through Richmond, Vallejo, Cordelia and Vacaville, the hot chocolate gone cold, the éclairs untouched. He’d kept the music low so as not to wake her—a reggae mix he’d downloaded himself, mostly Marley, built around live and studio versions of “Rebel Music,” a tune he couldn’t get enough of—and that was a real onus because he felt so loose and liberated, so purely on fire, and he wanted to make his new top-of-the-line Bose speakers just burn with it. But Madison asleep was infinitely preferable to Madison awake, and he restrained himself. And though he wanted to open the car up, see what it could do, he kept to the inside lane and held it at seven
ty—there’d be plenty of open road on the way down to Vegas and across the high desert, heading east. He saw himself for a moment then, a snapshot of the future, purple-edged clouds closing over the claws of the hoodoos and the dead dry mountains, Natalia asleep with her head in his lap and Madison silent in back, the beat driving the speakers and the unbridled horses under the hood all pounding in unison. Who was that masked man? Was that a jet or just thunder?
He was feeling good. Better than good. He laid a hand on Natalia’s thigh, where the skirt rode up over the dark silk of her stockings. “You know what I want to do, first thing, when we get there?”
She was reading a magazine, her hair thick and shining as she bent over it, her features alive. “What you always want to do?” she said, giving him a coy sidelong glance.
“That’s for tonight.” He slid his hand down, gave her knee a squeeze. “No, I want to go straight to the pool and then the hot tub and the sauna, sweat a little, and then get a rubdown—a massage, twin massages, you and me. How’s that sound?”
Her smile was for him and him alone, the sharp perfect cut of her lips, down-dwelling and in-dwelling, pure invitation, pure lust. “Will we not eat first?”
“And then cocktails,” he said, running on ahead of her, “early cocktails, maybe even a piña colada or something in the massage room, dress for dinner, of course, best place in town, and then over to Stateline to hit the blackjack tables.”
“And Madison? What of Madison?”
A glance to the rearview mirror: a pickup there, half a dozen cars behind that, spread out across the roadway, a big off-white eighteen-wheeler gearing up to pass on the left. “Oh, hell—I don’t care, we’ll load her up with videos and get one of those in-hotel babysitters. We’re celebrating, right? No expense spared? This is a vacation, baby, and we’ll make it last as long as you want—”
“Yes,” and the smile began to fade though she tried to keep it intact, “and that will be when we arrive in a new home, yes, a house in the forest, a house all to ourselves—and Madison is enrolled for her school. That is when the vacation will finish.” She paused, glanced beyond him to the road and addressed her words to the windshield: “It is a nice house?”
“You’ve seen the pictures, are you kidding me? It’s class, pure class. Two acres, it sits on. With a pool. And a built-in bar.”
“Nicer than the condo?”
“You kidding? It’s like an estate.”
“And this option to buy?” He watched her lips as she formed the words; she always homed in on the central proposition, infallibly. “You will exercise it if I like the place—we will exercise it, yes? In my name too?”
She was making her bid, and he couldn’t blame her. He didn’t mind. Sure, why not? He’d need to turn over the profit on the condo, anyway, and he had a few things going, this scheme Sandman had outlined for him, for one thing, and he might get lucky at the tables—in fact, he knew he would. He could feel it, the whole trajectory of it, up, up and up. He couldn’t lose. And there was the car—he’d get clear of that, pick up another one. Two cars, a new Z-4 for her, and something for him too, not a Mustang, though—and not a Harley either. “Right,” he said. “Yeah, of course. And you’re going to love the shopping—there’s no place in the world like Manhattan.”
“Not even Jaroslavl?”
“Well, I don’t know. Is that the place with twenty million people and Bergdorf’s and Macy’s and Tiffany’s and the Diamond District?”
She was grinning. She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Grand Central. The Empire State Building? Le Cirque and Babbo and the Oyster Bar?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head till her hair swung free, side to side, “no, I don’t think so.”
He loved this kind of banter, loved to see her like this, all the shrewd compacted energy of her wired to the moment, smiling, loose-limbed, beautiful. And content. Content, for once. He felt his cock stir. He wanted her in bed.
“Tell me about Bergdorf’s,” she said.
The Mercedes hummed, the sun painted the highway before him on into the distance. He was aware of Bob Marley, faintly delineating his rage under the sweet fractured musicality of her voice as she shifted from one subject to the next, from Manhattan to drainage problems with the basements of old houses to the cat she wanted to get—a Bengal cat; had he ever heard of the breed? Just four generations out of the wild. A beautiful animal. Exquisite. And maybe she’d get two of them, a male and female, to breed them, and she’d send a kitten to Kaylee and maybe one to her brother in Toronto. FedEx. Did they FedEx live animals?
He felt the pulse of the music, nodded, touched her, kept his eyes on the road. And before he knew it they hit the turnoff for Tahoe.
He didn’t realize Madison was awake until he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the etiolated little kernel of her face centered there. She was sitting up, perched on the edge of the seat, straining the limits of the seat belt—which he’d insisted on fastening while she was asleep. There was a red crease on one side of her face and her hair looked like something washed up out of the sea. For the moment she was recalibrating, wearing that dazed and disoriented look of children everywhere when they climb up out of the caverns of sleep, but he knew that it was just a matter of time before the whining started in. He was no child psychologist and he couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like with the last jerk Natalia was attached to, but the kid seemed excessively needy, a complainer, a whiner. Not at all like Sukie. Sukie was a stalwart. Even as a baby she settled into herself, slept through the night, ate when she was fed and gurgled at the mobile over the crib for hours at a time. She walked early, talked early, knew how to entertain herself, and right from the start seemed to understand that adults sometimes needed a few minutes of peace in their lives. But not Madison. She wanted and wanted and wanted. Just like her mother.
Maybe ten seconds passed before she started in. “Mommy, I have to pee,” she announced, her voice reduced to its doleful essence. Of course she had to pee. He understood that, he was no monster, but he’d been hoping to make it as far as Rancho Cordova, to the hotel there, for lunch, and once he got going he didn’t like to stop. And once they stopped she’d be hungry—and, perversely, and just this once, not for éclairs, because they were warm now and mushy—and they’d wind up eating some third-rate roadside crap and he could forget about the filet he’d had on his mind for the past half hour. He cranked the music a notch and watched the road as Natalia swung round in the seat.
“Can you hold it, honey?”
“No.”
“Dana—I mean Bridger—got you some nice éclairs. You want an éclair?”
“I have to pee.”
He was staring straight ahead, absorbing Marley, but he could feel her turning her face to him. “We must stop. Next exit.”
Softly, because he didn’t want to spoil the mood, he let out a curse.
“I know,” she said, “but what can we do—wet her pants?”
“Mom-my!”
He said nothing, but already he was flipping the turn signal, looking for the next exit, even as Natalia added, “And she will need to eat something.” To Madison: “You want eggs, honey? Scrambled eggs and sausage, your favorite? With ketchup? All the ketchup you want?”
There was no answer, no answer was immediately forthcoming, but the whining struck a new note of urgency and he gave it up, merging smoothly with the line of cars pulling off the highway and into the lot of Johnny Lee’s Family Restaurant, Open 24 Hours. Hey, Mister Cop / Ain’t got no birth cerfiticate on me now.
“So,” Natalia said, leaning into him with the sway of the car, her voice rich with satisfaction, as it always was when he did what she wanted him to, “we must forbear your filet mignon in Rancho Cordova—”
“Forgo.”
“Right, forgo. And instead we dine at the family restaurant. How is it you say? No big thing, yes?”
He took the exit ramp maybe a hair too fast and s
omething—a toy—skittered across the dash, struck the window and caromed to the floor at his feet. He gave her a look—he was irritated, despite himself, but he wasn’t going to show it. “No big thing,” he said, and he even managed a smile.
It was worse than he’d expected, one of those hokey theme places (wagon wheels on the wall, sepia photographs of prospectors and the hind ends of their mules, waitresses in cowgirl hats and outfits that could have been lifted out of the Dale Evans Museum). Natalia took the kid straight to the restroom while he put in their name with the hostess and then they had to wait fifteen minutes in line with an assortment of copper-haired old ladies and clowns with bolo ties and checked shirts while Madison squirmed and jerked at her mother’s hand and fell to the floor and refused to get up because she was hungry, the non-stop chant of When, Mommy, when are we going to get a table? rising up out of the forest of old people’s legs like the squall of some misplaced sylvan thing that was dying or about to be killed. The buoyancy he’d felt earlier, the high that was compounded in equal parts of relief at getting out of Shelter Bay Village before things went disastrously and irreparably wrong and the anticipation of kicking loose on the road, was gone now. Breakfast on the road was always the weakest link in the culinary chain, a kind of deprivation of the senses that reduced every possibility to a variant on eggs/sausage links/silver-dollar pancakes and maple-colored Karo syrup. It bored him. Made him angry. Even in a decent hotel, where you could get quiche, eggs Benedict, a crab-and-feta omelet, fresh-squeezed orange juice, the meal was still a bore. But this—he looked round him with a sudden cymbal-clang of hate—this was the worst.
