by T. C. Boyle
“Martin?” the hostess called out, and the line stirred, heads swiveling round, feet shuffling impatiently, and for a moment he didn’t realize she was summoning him till Natalia nudged him and he raised his hand like a third grader in the back of the classroom. By the time they were sliding into the booth with its butt-warmed benches and the red Formica tabletop strewn with the refuse of the previous party, he was feeling murderous.
“I want a sundae,” Madison announced, her face composed, eyes wide and unblinking and perfectly serious. “Like that girl.” She pointed to the next booth over, where a whole rat-pack of kids—six or seven of them—dug into various ice cream concoctions while their parents, two interchangeable couples with porcine faces and a lack of style that was nothing short of brutal, roared over their coffee and grease-spattered plates as if they’d been drunk for days.
“No sundae,” Natalia said automatically. “Eggs.”
Madison repeated her demand, her voice pinched higher.
“Shut it,” he hissed, leaning into the table, because you could only take so much shit in this life, one dried and cubed block of it stacked atop another till the whole thing came tumbling down, and he’d been under some pressure lately, he realized that. And because he realized it, he was able to restrain himself from reaching out for her boneless little wrist and giving it the kind of squeeze that would have opened up a whole new world for her. But he didn’t have to get physical—one look, the look he’d laid on Stuart Yan on the courthouse steps—was enough to silence her. It was a look he’d practiced, the don’t-fuck-with-me look he’d worn for eleven and a half months at Greenhaven. “You’ll eat what you get.”
The compromise was something called Pancakes Jubilee, three rubbery thin wafers of griddle-compacted dough buried under a mound of strawberries and about three feet of whipped cream. Natalia, whose appetite always astounded him, had the Cattleman’s Breakfast, four eggs sunny-side up with a sixteen-ounce steak, ranch beans, pico de gallo and a basket of flour tortillas. He had coffee, black.
“Do you not want to try a bite of my steak?” Natalia kept asking him. “Did you not say you wanted a steak? Here, try. It’s good.”
He was furious—acting like a child himself, he knew it. “No,” he said, “I don’t want your steak. Tahoe. I’ll eat in Tahoe. Okay?”
Across the table, Madison wore a beard of whipped cream, whipped cream to her nostrils and beyond. Her eyes were glazed with the sugar fix and the fork was stuck to her hand. Breakfast was over.
Outside, where people stood around on the faux ranch-house porch picking their teeth and grinding mints between their molars, the heat seized him. It must have been a hundred already, though his watch showed just past nine-thirty in the morning. The sun was a hammer. It wanted to take everything down, flatten it right to the ground. There was a smell of incineration, of grease blown out through the kitchen fans, of the kind of death that mummified you before you hit the ground. He watched a crow, its feathers the color of coal dust, dance around something crushed on the pavement as he shrugged out of his sport coat and folded it over one arm. Jesus. How could people stand this shit? How could anybody actually live here? he wondered, tensing up all over again, and no, the coffee hadn’t helped, not a bit. He took Natalia by the arm. Down the three bleached wooden steps they went, to the burning lake of the parking lot. Predictably, Madison said, “Mommy, I’m hot.”
It was then, at that precise moment, that the black Jetta pulled into the lot and he saw the two faces suspended there behind the sunstruck windshield. A man and a woman. Everything went silent, the speakers hidden up under the support beams piping out a thin tinny jangle of country guitars, the whoosh of the traffic on the highway, the jet poised overhead. He’d trained himself to stay cool, be cool, to hide the least tic of emotion behind an immobile face and the stark stabbing outraged sheen of his eyes, pure aggression, and he stared right at them, stared hard, though he was scared, afraid they might swing out in front of the restaurant and try to run him down, and spooked on a deeper level too: how in Christ’s name did they know he was here? Here, of all places? Even he hadn’t known he was going to be here.
Seconds, that was all he had, because the woman—Dana Halter, Dr. Dana Halter—was bent over her cell phone and if the cops stepped in and checked his ID against hers or his, Bridger’s, there was no hope of talking his way clear of this. Even as he increased the pressure on Natalia’s arm, even as she said, “What is the hurry?” and he silenced her with a look, snatched up Madison as if she were an overnight bag and set a brisk pace for the car, it came to him that they must have been hidden somewhere in the lot and followed him when he pulled out of the condo. He cursed himself. He was lax, he was stupid. All of this shit—and he was so wired suddenly it was as if he’d grabbed hold of a high-voltage cable with his bare hands—all of it, all of it, he’d called down on his own head.
But there was the car, a hundred feet away, Madison squirming in his grip, Natalia gone white with the fear that sprang up full-blown out of his frantic headlong urgency, seventy-five feet, fifty, and the two of them were out of the car now, shouting something, brandishing cell phones—both of them, they both had phones, as if Cingular wireless was the supreme force in the universe. “No,” he spat, “no,” as he flung Madison sprawling into the back, jerked Natalia in beside him and slammed the door, “no time”—he meant the belts, the seatbelts—and so what if the buzzer cried out to warn him, and these people, these creeps, were looming up in the rearview, the doors were locked, the engine cranked, and with a flick of the wrist he was out of the parking space, straight ahead, up over the concrete bumper and on into the dirt lot beyond it, heading for the highway in a plume of crushed weed, flying cans and airborne dust.
Strangely, perversely, he found himself worrying about the paint job as he caromed across the vacant lot, thumped through a gully and bore up onto the ramp, cutting off two dickheads in an old hearse with a band logo filigreed across the back panel even as the tires took hold of the pavement and began to sing. The car didn’t matter. It was nothing. He’d have to lose it anyway, and soon. There was the blast of the dickheads’ horn and then he was right up on the rear end of a Winnebago doing about two miles an hour where the ramp narrowed before merging onto the highway. A glance at Natalia’s grim bloodless face, and then his eyes went to the rearview, where the hearse was gunning up on him, horn squalling and the two dickheads stabbing their middle fingers at the windshield. They didn’t interest him. What interested him was the black Jetta tearing out of the parking lot and up onto the ramp behind them.
Natalia didn’t say a word. Even Madison, rough handling and all, seemed to be holding her breath. Directly ahead of them was the creeping beige, white and lemon-yellow wall of the Winnebago, bicycles, lawn chairs and cooking grills strapped to it as if in some frenzy of reenactment, and right there on their bumper was the hearse. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the ramp fell under the wheels, no room to maneuver on either side because the narrow sweeping arc of it had been cut through rock the color of dried blood, and there were two horns competing now, the Jetta on the bumper of the hearse, arms waving, mouths flung open in rigid oral display. He heard his own voice then, just as the ramp began to broaden out to the highway: “Put your seat belts on.”
What amazed him about it later was the way the Jetta had stayed with him. The hearse fell back as if it were hooked to a chain and the Winnebago was just part of the scenery, but the Jetta came on even as he put his foot to the floor and cut everything else away from him. When he hit a hundred and ten, he was aware of a movement beside him—Natalia, her mouth clamped and her eyes in retreat, sliding in back to cling to her daughter—but the gesture meant nothing, not now. At a hundred twenty the car discovered what it was made for, all those German horses, the Autobahn, cruising speed. There was a part of him that knew he was in trouble, knew that they could be punching in 911 and telling the dispatcher anything, that there was a drunk driver up ahead, a reckless driver, a deran
ged life-endangering criminal in a wine-colored Mercedes with dealer placards that might as well have been flags whipping in the wind, but there was another part, a larger part, that just didn’t give a shit, the part that ran on adrenaline and pushed his foot to the floor.
Later, after the Jetta had become a memory and Natalia had run out of breath bitching at him and he’d filled whole cauldrons with qualifications and sophistries and outright lies (Oh, hey, they were bad people, people he’d done a real estate deal with who didn’t want to honor their contractual obligations, and didn’t she know real estate people were the worst?), after she fell asleep wrapped up in back with her daughter and he eased off the main road at Placerville to take the Gold Country Highway back on up to I-80, he began to think about the immediate future. Tahoe was out, definitely out, and he’d have to ditch the car as soon as he could, but 80 would take him to Reno and from Reno he could find a road south to Vegas—it would be a long drive, a lot longer than he’d counted on, and it would involve some elaborate explanation and days of worship at the altar of her, but it was necessary at this point. He’d had a close call. A learning experience.
That was behind him now. The scenery was improving. He cranked the music, let the wheels roll under him. After a while he found himself singing along, keeping time with the flat of his hand against the dash, the adrenaline slowly draining from his veins even as the road climbed and the trees thickened and the naked faces of the mountains began to catch and shape the light. He hit the accelerator to blow past an RV sleepily towing a car behind it and made himself a promise: there was no way anybody was ever going to find him again.
Five
ANGER DIDN’T BEGIN to describe what she was feeling. It was rage, cold and clear-eyed, unwavering, ecstatic, the rage of the psychopath, the soldier under fire, the wielder of the blade. Never in her life had she felt anything like it, not when she was a child sitting across from her mother at the kitchen table in her witch’s black rags and the ghoul-green facepaint she’d spent half an hour on, burning to fly out the door on her broom and go trick-or-treating with her school friends, and her mother making her sit there through ten repetitions of her vowel drill, ten full repetitions, though it was Halloween and she pleaded and spat and stormed up to her room and felt the house shudder with the violence of the door splintering the frame; not when she’d been locked up in the county jail with the drunks and degenerates and no one to listen to her; not when she’d stood in the hallway at the courthouse and watched her lawyer’s face go slack as they took her back into custody though she’d been cleared of all charges and everyone knew it was a farce and she could have screamed till the walls came crashing down around them. This was different. This was incendiary.
Just the sight of him, that was all it took. The look on his face, the way he walked, the clothes he was wearing. After all the tension and anticipation, after working herself up so she could barely breathe, after taking it out on Bridger and feeling her stomach clench with loss and hate and frustration, there he was, standing right there in front of them—Frank Calabrese, or whatever his name was—in his pin-striped designer shirt and buffed red leather Docs, his jacket thrown carelessly over one arm, his wife the liar and their kid at his side, and he tried to stare them down as if they were the ones who’d stolen from him. And then he’d turned his back and ignored them, ignored their shouts and accusations as if he were deaf too—“Thief!” she’d screamed, over and over, bursting from the car and charging across the lot, her arms waving as if she were calling down an airstrike, and she thought they had him, finally had him, because people were beginning to turn their heads and somebody would call the police, she would, Bridger would, and he was trapped there in the parking lot in the unforgiving blaze of nine-thirty in the morning and nothing he could do about it. She felt a thrill go through her. He was doomed. Dead in the water. Dead meat.
Yet everything about him, from the sway of his shoulders to the thrust-back arrogance of his face, said it was no trouble at all, no problem, somebody else’s affair. He was steady, brisk, steering his numb-faced wife and the kid toward the car with quick efficient strides, for all the world no more concerned than if he were out taking a little exercise after church in the languid hundred-degree heat. She and Bridger were nothing to him, less than nothing, and the thought of it made her seize with hatred. If she’d had a gun, she would have used it. Or she could have. She really believed she could have.
She had something on him, though—evidence, a totem, an artifact. Even as he mounted the cement curb in the Mercedes and took off across the vacant lot, she saw it lying there on the pavement, right where he’d slid into the car and slammed the door behind him. His jacket. Marooned in the rush to escape. Dropped. Forgotten. She was sweating, her heart pounding, already shortening her stride, and she bent without thinking to snatch it up before reversing direction and breaking for her own car with everything she had.
All the while, caught behind the Winnebago as Bridger pounded the horn and she leaned out the window shrieking and gesticulating as if she’d come unhinged and the road opened up and the Mercedes pulled steadily away from them until it was a faint gleam in the distance and then, heartbreakingly, gone altogether, the jacket lay on the floor at her feet. It was there as Bridger swerved in and out of traffic, dialing 911 to shout lies to the dispatcher—“Drunk driver!” he yelled into the phone, “Drunk driver!”—there all the way through the long ascent to South Lake Tahoe while she fixed her eyes on the road, rounding each curve with the expectation of seeing the blinking lights of the highway patrol and Frank Calabrese up against the car with the handcuffs on him. Then they were in the town itself, cruising the streets, scanning the parking lots and back alleys, rolling in and out of motel lots, scrutinizing every red car they came across, and she was so intent on the chase, so wound up in what she was doing, she never gave the jacket a thought. Or the slash on her head either. It was just there, part of the world in its new configuration.
The altitude at Tahoe was 6,225 feet, according to the sign posted at the town limits, and the weather was radically different here. There were streaks of snow on the mountains above the lake, the sky was socked-in and the air coming through the vent felt chilly against her face. Bridger was hunched over the wheel, steering with his wrists, looking beaten. For a long while they said nothing, the car creeping past shops, supermarkets, gas stations, condos, one street after another. “Let’s face it, we lost him,” he said finally, his eyes rimmed red with exhaustion. “He could be visiting a friend in one of these condos, he could be in a casino in Stateline, he could—” He shrugged, said something she didn’t quite get. “The license—you know, the dealer plates—do you remember what they said, I mean, the dealer name? I think it was Bob-Something Mercedes?”
“Bob Almond Mercedes/BMW,” she said. “Larkspur.”
He’d put on his thoughtful look. They were going so slowly they might as well have been walking. “Because I was thinking—I mean, this isn’t getting us anywhere—we could call Milos and he could maybe check out the dealer and see who bought the car, what name, I mean—”
“I don’t want to go back there,” she said, surprising herself. “And besides, he wouldn’t use his real name, would he?”
“Get a serial number or something—a vehicle identification number.”
“What good’s that going to do?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “What about the jacket?”
The jacket, yes. It was flung at her feet like one of those mats they put down to protect the carpet. She reached for it, smoothed it in her lap: raw silk, in black, with red detailing. A smell of cologne rose to her nostrils, and something else too, something deeper, denser: the smell of him, the smell of his body, his underarms, his skin. “Hugo Boss,” she announced, turning over the label. “Nice to know the bastard has taste, huh? Did you see him,” she said, running a hand through the inside pocket, “the way he looked at us? The balls?” There was something there, something har
d—sunglasses, Rvo, two hundred fifty dollars a pair. She held them up so Bridger could see.
He gave them a cursory glance and then his eyes jumped suddenly to the mirror—someone must have beeped at him—and he hit the blinker and pulled into a No Parking/No Standing Zone as a little black car, a Mini, shot past them. After a moment, he took the glasses from her and held them at length as if examining some dead thing he’d found under the sink, then clapped them on his face. They were wraparounds, metallic silver. “Yeah,” he said, checking himself out in the rearview, “I hear you.”
She plunged her hand into the outer pocket on the left side and came up with a comb to which a straggle of dense dark hairs adhered, a Sharpie pen that looked unused and a thin wad of tissue. An odd feeling came over her, even as Bridger turned to her and said, “How do I look?” She slid her fingers over the teeth of the comb, lifted it to her nostrils—there was the smell of him again, of his scalp and the shampoo he used, and it was as if she knew him in some elemental way, as if she’d been with him, the violation mutual.
A light rain began to spot the windshield. Bridger’s head floated there beside her, but he wasn’t Bridger exactly, not with the slit reptilian orbits of his eyes, the reflective lenses slashing at his features, reducing him. “Take them off,” she said.
He swiveled his head and removed the sunglasses, and even as he said, “Is that it?” she dug into the other pocket and came up with a slip of paper, a receipt from Johnny Lee’s Family Restaurant, and held it up to the light.
“What is it, a credit card receipt? That could be something. What does it say?”
It took her a moment, the print blurred and pointillated, but then it came together, the total, the tax, the account number and the slashing confident signature under the cardholder’s name: Bridger Martin.
