by T. C. Boyle
“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, it was funny. Just goes to show you what you value when you have nothing.”
“Right, you have nothing, no water, no trees, nothing but rocks. That’s why you bomb the World Trade Center. That’s why you carry weapons—so you can take what you want.”
“Like Peck Wilson.”
He gave her a look. The train lurched over a bad section of track, jolting the bagel he’d been gesturing with. She watched it float up against the backdrop of the Hudson, tightly clamped in the grip of his floating fingers. “I guess,” he said. “Yeah.”
“Do you think he has a gun?”
He shrugged. “He’s an ex-con, isn’t that what Frank Calabrese said?”
“So yes?”
“Which is all the more reason to stay away from him. I mean, look what it’s got you, what it’s got us—ruined credit, running all over the country, no money, no job, and now your car.”
“But we are going to drive by, right? Or maybe park around the block and just walk by in case he recognizes my car”—he was saying something but she wasn’t watching—“just walk, that’s all. And if we see him, or the car—the car would be the key—we call the police.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. They’ve been real friendly and understanding, haven’t they?”
She felt that burr of irritation again, couldn’t help herself. She made an effort to control her voice, breathe in, breathe out. “I’m not giving up,” she said, and she had no idea what she sounded like. “Not now. Not when we’re this close.”
It took him a minute. He turned his head to gaze out on the river and the distant fractured cliffs of the Palisades, then swung back to her, his eyes compact and hard. “That’s all we’re going to do,” he said. “Just walk.”
It was quarter past eleven when they arrived at the Peterskill station and it must have been a hundred already, or close to it. Bridger wanted to walk to the garage—“It’s only like a mile,” he said, and she said, “No, it’s more like two, two and a half.” The station was right on the water, but there was no breeze and the sun ricocheted up into their faces. Cars pulled in and out of the lot, moving with slow deliberation, their windshields glazed with light. A knot of people crept past them with their shoulders slumped, borne down under the weight of the heat and trailing suitcases and elastic children. To make it worse, something was rotten, something dead along the shore, and the reek of it was calibrated to a persistent smell of frying from the café adjoining the depot. For a long moment they both just stood there glaring at each other until finally she said, “We’re taking a cab and I’m not going to argue about it.” And she couldn’t help adding a little sting to it. “It’s my money, anyway.”
At the garage, everybody was moving in slow motion, from the mechanics to the service manager who went over the bill with them to the secretary who typed it up and had Dana sign here and here and here. She and Bridger made a show of looking over the car, which had just come back from the body shop that very morning, and she wondered about a ripple effect in the paint you could only see in a certain light and from a certain angle, but the service manager assured her that there was nothing wrong and even produced a pristine high-quality cotton-fiber rag and buffed it for her. “You see?” he said. “What’d I tell you?” And while she watched his lips and face and understood what he was saying, she couldn’t see any appreciable difference—the ripples were still there. But it was hot. Mortally hot. And she didn’t say anything.
Bridger kept telling her to make sure everything felt right with the rear end and she put it in reverse and jerked back a few feet, nearly running over the once-white dog that lay comatose in the shade of the retaining wall, and then she was out on the street, feeling liberated. She had her car back. She was mobile. She could go anywhere she wanted, up the coast to Maine or back across the country to San Roque, or even down to Gallaudet, to show Bridger the campus where she’d spent something like nine years of her life. Or to that street where the moving van was, or had been—Peck Wilson’s street.
Bridger poked her. “How does it feel?”
“Fine.” It was a car—how should she know how it felt? It negotiated the bumps and potholes, responded to the pressure of her hands on the wheel, took her where she wanted to go.
“It’s not pulling, is it?”
She didn’t answer. There was hardly any traffic, a dead town on a dead day—a Saturday—and she was looking for a stretch of road where she could open it up a bit, feel the breeze tear through the windows and take hold of her hair, but there were just city streets and hills and stoplights. “You feel like lunch?” she asked, turning to him. “Before we—before we take our little walk? Our little stroll? Hmm? Lunch? Does that sound good?”
They found a diner in the middle of town, a real authentic one—echt, wasn’t that the word?—fashioned from an old railway car, and sat there in the stultifying heat with their clothes sticking to the leather-backed seats while they ordered sandwiches they barely touched and downed glass after glass of pre-sweetened iced tea. Both doors were open and an old upright fan was going in the corner. There were flies everywhere, legions of them gang-piling on the window ledges and drifting haplessly in and out the doors. She’d ordered tuna on rye, not the best choice for a tropical day in a place where the refrigeration might be suspect, which was why Bridger had said, “I’m sticking with the bacon on a hard roll,” but it wasn’t bad—it was good, even. And when the waitress, big in the hips, cheery and efficient, brought her face into view and asked, “What’s the matter, honey, is everything all right or is it just the heat?,” she smiled and said, “Just the heat.”
In fact, she was feeling good. Feeling lucky. This was the day, she knew it, and in the cramped cubicle of the ladies’ that was no bigger than a shower stall, she reapplied her lipstick in the scratched-over mirror and gave herself a big relaxed smile, a beautiful smile, the smile her mother always said would be the making of her—“With that smile,” she’d say, “with that face, you’ll go anywhere,” as if a smile could make up for her fried cochlea or disarm the stranger who looked at her as if she’d been just let out of the zoo. But here it was, her beautiful smile, consummate and full-lipped, staring back at her from the mirror, the very smile she was going to lay on Peck Wilson when they were leading him away in chains.
They didn’t want to risk driving by the house, so she took a parallel street and found a spot to park under a big over-spreading maple in a long row of them. Bridger climbed out of the car and stretched as if they’d been driving for hours instead of minutes. He was wearing a T-shirt from one of the Kade films, red on black, featuring the hero’s outsized head in some sort of leather helmet, and though The Kade was meant to look menacing she found the representation faintly ridiculous. He looked constipated. Looked weak and old and at the mercy of his agents. “Nice T-shirt,” she said. “Did I tell you how much I love it?”
He grinned from over the roof of the car. “Yeah,” he said. “You did. But The Kade is my man, you know that. If it weren’t for him Radko’d probably be out of business by now.”
“I hear you,” she said, and they both laughed. She was wearing a T-shirt herself, also black, emblazoned with the name of a band she liked. Or would like to like. And a pair of shorts, loose-fit but not nearly as baggy as Bridger’s. Despite the heat she had on her running shoes—or better yet, walking shoes. Her first impulse that morning was to go with something open-toed, sandals, flip-flops, but she’d caught herself: you never knew what the day would bring or just how involved this little stroll was going to turn out to be. The thought of it, coming back to her now as she tucked her purse under the seat and locked the car door, made her stomach clench. “You have your cell?” she asked.
Bridger whipped it from his pocket and held it aloft.
“Okay,” she said, “then I guess we’re ready.”
The houses here weren’t as dominating as the peeling Victorians closer to the center of town, but they seemed to be from
the same general period—they were just scaled down, as if the people with more modest incomes had wound up here while the brewers and factory owners and bankers expressed themselves more grandly. And conveniently. Or maybe she was all wrong. She didn’t know much about architecture, and she would have been the first to admit it. But certainly generations upon generations had lived here, unlike in California, and she could see that reflected in the grim stature of most of the houses, gray and nondescript but still standing after all these years.
They turned right at the corner and there, at the far end of the block, was Peck Wilson’s street—what was it called again? Division? Division Street? That was fitting, wasn’t it? Or how about Jailhouse Road? Thieves’ Alley? Hadn’t she seen a street on the map called Gallows Hill Road? That’s where he should have lived, the son of a bitch, Gallows Hill Road. She was going to mention that to Bridger, lighten his mood, but she saw that his eyes were fixed on the corner ahead and he’d unconsciously quickened his stride. She skipped a couple of steps to catch up to him, then took hold of his hand and squeezed it hard and moved in to match him stride for stride.
A car went up the street and turned at the corner, leaving a taint of exhaust heavy on the air. Two kids on bicycles chased each other up the opposite sidewalk. The leaves of the trees curled in on themselves. And then they were on the street itself, Peck Wilson’s street—an abrupt right at the corner and there was the house where the U-Haul had been parked, and there, across the street and half a dozen houses down, partially obscured by the shrubs and trees and the line of cars parked along the curb, was the house they’d come to visit. She felt Bridger tense at her side, both of them straining to see as they strolled hand in hand up the walk, each step bringing them closer. Bridger stripped off his sunglasses—Peck Wilson’s sunglasses—as if to see better. They were directly across from the house now, trying to act casual, but there was nothing to see as far as she could tell.
“What do you think?” Bridger said.
They were still walking, moving past the house and heading for the end of the block, the sun lying in stripes across the sidewalk ahead of them, somebody’s sprinkler going, a dog showing its teeth from behind a rusted iron fence. “I don’t know,” she said, feeling all the air go out of her, “it looks closed up to me.”
He had his shoulders thrown back, his head cocked in a way she recognized: he was agitated, keyed up, almost twitching with all that testosterone charging through him. She remembered a lecture she’d attended in college—an animal behaviorist, a woman who’d worked with the chimps of Gombe and the bonobos in the Congo, showed a film of the males working themselves up in threat display, and all the students, all of her deaf compatriots, had burst into laughter. They didn’t need to go to Africa to study body language—they saw it every minute of every day.
“Yeah, but all these houses look closed up,” he said, bringing his face so near she could smell the residue of the bacon on his breath, “because everybody’s just hunkered down in front of the TV with the air conditioner going full blast. We need to”—but she missed the rest of it because they were crossing the street at the corner now, nice and square, nice and rectilinear, up on the far sidewalk and swing left, the cars idling at the light with their windows rolled up and their own air conditioners delivering the goods. The heat rose up off the pavement and hit her in the face as if she were walking through a wall and letting it crumble round her.
And then everything suddenly speeded up, fast forward to the end, the sun, the trees, the sidewalks and cars all dissolving in a blur that crystallized in the rear bumper of a wine-red Mercedes shooting past them, the right turn blinker on and a little girl’s limp doll pressed to the window in back.
PART V
One
HE WAS SO BOUND UP in the moment, so intent on the faces at the open door and hyper-aware of Natalia preening and swelling at his side, so busy struggling with the stuffed toy and the candy and the flowers and fumbling toward the semi-coherent murmur of the half-formed phrases on his lips, that he didn’t see it coming. Didn’t look over his shoulder. Didn’t clear his sight lines. Didn’t watch his back. “Hi, honey,” he was going to say, “remember me?” And would she come to him? Would her face open up the way it used to when he was the heart and soul and dead glowing center of her universe or was she going to freeze him out? And his mother. His mother with her new haircut and big swaying gauzy blouse that bunched at her hips and gave way to the trailing skirt and the pipestems of her legs. “Hi, Mom,” he was going to say, “this is Natalia. My fiancée. My fiancée, Natalia.” And Natalia would be giving Sukie the fish eye, putting two and two together, working herself up over her own daughter’s exile at that overpriced camp at the end of the dirt road that left a tattered blanket of dust clinging to the car every day and yet drawing all her strings tight to make a good impression in front of his mother and still riding high on the current of those three soaring syllables, fiancée. There was all that. All that and the heat too.
He’d just shifted the toy from his right arm to his left—it was ridiculous, the biggest thing in the store, a life-size stuffed replica of a sled dog, replete with the blue glass buttons of its eyes—to take hold of Natalia’s hand and lead her up the walk, when there was another face there, two faces, hovering suddenly at the margin of his peripheral vision. His and hers. He cut his eyes right and there was a single lost beat in there somewhere before he felt the shock knife through him. It was as if he were ten years old all over again, thrilling to his first slasher flick, no children under sixteen allowed without parent or guardian, the theater gone silent, the maniac loose—and then the scream, stark, universal, collaborative. Rising.
The stuffed dog fell to the ground. He let go of Natalia’s hand even as she said, “What, what is it?” and turned to follow his eyes and see them there sprung up out of the concrete walk not twenty feet away like figures out of a dream, a bad dream, terminally bad, the worst, and though he was cool, always cool—Peck Wilson, never ruffled, never at a loss, never weak—he couldn’t help himself now.
He didn’t stop to think how they’d come to track him here, how they were like parasites, how they wouldn’t let go and could never learn no matter how many times he taught them, because this moment was beyond thought or resentment or fear, a moment that broke loose inside of him in a sudden ejaculation of violence. Ten steps, too quick to blink, the heart of the panther his tae kwon do instructor always talked about beating now in place of his own, his hands doing their thing independent of his will, perfect balance, and the fool was actually coming to him, flailing his arms like a fairy. And cursing—“you motherfucker” and the like—as if he had breath to waste. The first blow—the sonnal mok anchigi, knifehand strike to the neck—rocked him, and then two quick chops to drop his arms, ride back on the left foot and punch through the windpipe with the right.
Somebody screamed. The heat ran at him, all-encompassing, a sea of heat at flood tide. Another scream. It wasn’t Natalia screaming, it wasn’t his mother or Sukie either. This was like nothing he’d ever heard, ugly, just ugly. And there was the bitch emitting it, right there watching Bridger Martin jerk on the grass and clutch at his own throat as if he wanted to throttle himself, two quick kicks to the ribs to make it easier on him, and it was just the two of them now. Just him and Dana Halter, in her shorts and T-shirt, her face twisted with the insoluble conundrum of that unholy voice wedded to that hard moment. And then, as if it had all been decided beforehand, he went for her and she dodged away and they were both running.
There was nothing in his mind but to lash out, hurt her, bring her low, crush her, and he almost had her in the first furious rush, a snatch at her trailing arm and the fine articulated bones of her flashing wrist, but she was too quick for him, and the fury of his failure—the bitch, the bitch, the relentless bitch—burst behind his eyes in a pulse of irradiated heat so that he was blind to everything but the tan soles of her pumping shoes and the fan of her retreating hair. He burned, bu
rned. Every cord in his body snapped to attention. He was in shape, good shape, but so was she, running for her life, running to beat him, humiliate him, wear him down, and they’d gone the length of the block and she was still ten feet beyond him.
Up ahead, the light was turning red. He saw it and calculated his chance because she would have to pivot to go left or swing right and cross the street with the green and that would slow her a fraction of a second, just long enough—but she surprised him, hurtling straight through the intersection without even turning her head, and the blue pickup, coming hard, had to swerve to avoid her and he was the one who lost a step, dodging round the rear bumper while the driver cursed and the horn blared. What he should have done, if he’d been thinking, was double back and pack Natalia in the car and make scarce before somebody called the cops, but he wasn’t thinking. She was fleeing, he was chasing. He was going to run her down by the end of the next block, that was what he was going to do, run her down and have his sixty seconds with her, payback, and then he’d be gone.
He could hear the torn sheet of her breathing, the slap of her feet pounding at the concrete walk. Her shoulders rocked, her hair jogged as if it had come loose from her scalp. And more: he could smell her, the torched ashes of her fear, the sweat caught under her arms and running like juice between her legs. He gained a step, but the heat rose up to put two hands against his chest and push at him even as he tried to close the gap and slam her to the pavement from behind. Faces drifted by behind the windshields of the cars easing down the street, there was somebody on a porch, the thump of the bass line from a hidden boom-box, voices, music, the buzz of a cicada. The blood shrieked in his ears. He wasn’t even winded.
At the next corner, the car—a white Chevy van—was moving too fast, gunning on the yellow to make the light, and the woman at the wheel hit her horn, laid into it, but this was a game of chicken now and he never hesitated. He had her, actually had his hand locked in her hair, the van sliding by like a bull brushing the cape, when the other car, the one he hadn’t seen, plunged in on the bumper of the van. That put an end to it. Where there had been nothing but air the strangest sudden act of prestidigitation interposed a plane of steel, chrome and safety glass, and they both hit it and went down to the smell of scorched rubber.
