by T. C. Boyle
Two black dudes. Young, angry-looking, scared. People had run crazy right into the side of their car, and they were smelling the scorched rubber too, slamming out of both doors while the traffic froze and Dana Halter jumped up like a rabbit and he jumped up too, absolutely capable of anything, anything. But then the siren whooped and the lights flashed and the patrol car was right there, sliding in to block off the intersection, and there was nowhere to go. For one instant he stared into her eyes, brown eyes, the black irises dilated with her fear and now her hate and now her triumph, and the cops were getting out of the cruiser, a tight-assed woman in schoolteacher glasses and an old guy, looking grim. Peck just stood there, sweating, trying to catch his breath. His left arm stung where he’d slammed it against the car and his pants were torn at the knee. He could have run, and wound up in jail—or shot. But he didn’t. He went deep and he focused and the cool descended like a long sheet of windblown rain because he saw the look on the lady cop’s face when she saw Dana, the flash of recognition there, and already one of the black dudes was starting in, overexcited, hysterical, his voice rising up and rising up until you could hear nothing else.
“What’s the trouble here?” the lady cop said, ignoring the black guy, looking from Dana to Peck and then settling there, on him. She had both her hands on her belt, as if it weighed more than she did. He knew the type. All bluff. And bullshit.
“I don’t know, Officer,” he heard himself say over the jabber of the black dude, “it was this lady”—he indicated Dana—“I think she’s crazy or maybe retarded or something? She ran out into the street like she was out of her mind and maybe she was trying to commit suicide, I don’t know, and I just tried, well, I grabbed for her, I mean, just out of instinct—”
The bitch cut in now. Her hair was stuck to her face, both her knees scraped and bleeding. She looked the part, looked demented, looked like they’d just let her out of the pyscho ward. She talked too fast, too loud, spinning out something unintelligible. “He, he—” was all he got. She was pointing at him. “Chase me,” she said. “I mean, chased me.”
“Crazy lady ran right into the side of my car—they’s a dent there in the back door, you can look for yourself, Officer, and, I mean, it’s not me. She ran right through the light and she didn’t even look one way, I mean, she never even turned her neck—”
“He’s a thief,” the bitch said, jerking her arms and stamping her foot in emphasis. “He, he—” and the rest was gone, just gibberish.
The old cop was there now, fumbling with his little pad and tamping his ballpoint pen against his open palm as if it held the key to the situation. Peck waited for him to look up, then glanced from him to the lady cop and shrugged, as if to say, Hey, she’s a mental case, can’t you see that? Could it be any clearer? Just listen to her.
He had maybe sixty seconds, two minutes max, and then there’d be somebody coming up the street from two blocks down, from his mother’s house, and he prayed it wouldn’t be Natalia, prayed she’d have the sense to get in the car and disappear. He listened as the bitch went on, her voice settling now, getting clearer, and he gave the lady cop an indulgent smile. “Maybe she’s on drugs or something,” he said. “I don’t know. I’m just a guy on my way down to get the paper—I mean, if she wants to die…And you know something else,” he said, and he pointed at the black dude now, the driver, “this guy was running the red light. Yeah, what about that?”
That stirred the brew. This man—he was in his twenties, wearing a basketball jersey and a doo-rag—was clearly not going to take this kind of shit, and his voice went up an octave and his buddy joined in even as the lady cop focused on the bitch and a whole crowd of people materialized. He saw his chance. Everyone was shouting, even the policewoman, trying to assert herself, apply some order, and he took two steps back and found himself on the fringe of the crowd. Two more steps and he was a bystander. Then he turned his back and ducked down the driveway of the nearest house and went up and over the fence in back, dropped down into the alley and took off running.
He must have gone three or four blocks, the change ringing in his pockets and his lungs on fire, before he slowed to a walk. A walk was better. A walk was just right. Because nobody would have mistaken him for a jogger in his taupe silk suit and checkerboard Vans and if he wasn’t a jogger then why was he running? Especially with that siren coming in over the trees like a jet plane on fire and caroming off the windows and spoiling the ball game on the radio? He forced himself to keep it under control, though his heart was banging and he’d sweated right through his clothes and he must have looked like shit with his eyes staring and his pants torn at the knee and his arms swaying as if he was some moron going door to door with magazine subscriptions or vacuum cleaners. But he didn’t have a vacuum cleaner or a briefcase or a sheaf of order forms or anything else. Just sweat. And torn pants.
People were sitting on their front stoops or in little patches of yard with their cooking grills and plastic lawn chairs, and what day was it, anyway? Saturday. Cookout, clambake, cold beer in the cooler. Two kids squatted in the shade of a street tree, cupping a cigarette. They both glanced up and gave him a look—they knew who belonged on their block and who didn’t—but he just put his head down and kept walking, angling toward the river, one block south, one block west, repeating the pattern till the sirens began to fade. He guessed somebody must have called the ambulance for Bridger Martin—and the cops too, because there’d been another siren going there for a while, and once they sorted things out they’d be looking for him. Without breaking stride, he fished out his shades, then shrugged out of the jacket and threw it over one shoulder. When he turned the next corner, he was on a street that dipped steeply down toward the train station—there was a bar there he knew, an old man’s bar in an old hotel that had been around forever—and he figured he’d slip in there where it was quiet and dark and nobody would even look up from their drinks. Order a beer. Sit at the bar. He’d be safe there and he’d have time to think things out.
He needed to call Natalia’s cell, that was his first priority, but when he patted down his pockets his own cell was missing and it came to him that he’d left it on the dash of the car—he could see it there, just as if he were re-running a video. And why was it there on the dash and not in his pocket? Because he’d called her from the car in the parking lot at the mall to tell her he was going to run into the toy store a minute because he had to get something and she’d said, “For Madison?” and he’d said, “Maybe,” and she’d said, “That’s sweet. You’re sweet. And I am sorry to be so late for you and I will be only one minute more.”
Right. But where was she now? Did the police have her? Were they asking her for ID? Asking about her immigration status? Asking who had assaulted Bridger Martin even while she told them it was Bridger Martin as if she were reliving some sort of Abbot and Costello routine? And who was the car registered to? And where did she live? And then there was Sukie. And his mother. Madison at camp. It was a nightmare, and he couldn’t see any way out of it, because even before this bitch had showed up on the scene and sent everything into orbit he’d been wondering how he was going to cover himself when his mother called him Peck, or worse yet, Billy, and Natalia locked those caustic eyes on him.
He glanced up and there was the river, indented along the near shore by the roofs and projecting angles of the buildings spread out below him, the train station coming into view now, a line of cars creeping up the hill as if hauled on an invisible cable. The sidewalk here had been lifted by the roots of the trees, slabs of concrete shuffled like cards all the way down the long hill, and he felt the strain in the back of his calves and the long muscles of his thighs as he worked his way over the rough spots. Then he was down in the flat, at river level, crossing against the light and moving along the walk in the lee of a restaurant he’d never seen before—upscale Italian, it looked like, and even in the fever of the moment he felt the sting of the irony—and then finally, with a glance in both directions,
he pulled back the door of the old man’s bar in the old hotel that had been converted to efficiency apartments and Rooms by the Week Only, and let the cool sweet mid-afternoon funk of the place suck him in like a vacuum.
The last thing he wanted was to get hammered or even the slightest bit discomposed, but the first two beers went down like air, and then he had a glass of water and ordered another beer—all in the first five minutes. “It’s a bitch out there, huh?” the bartender observed, working his hands in a bar rag, and a couple of the patrons looked up long enough to hear Peck confirm it. The Mets were on the TV. The jukebox was going. It could have been the most ordinary day of his life. He took a sip of the third beer, his thirst waning now—he’d never been so thirsty—and then he drifted back to the men’s to clean himself up and get some purchase on things.
The light and fan went on when he opened the door, the smell of the place barely masked by the urinal cake and the gumball deodorizer. His knee was scraped where he’d gone down in the street, but he didn’t bother with it, just dabbed at the dried blood on his pantleg and then threw some water on his face. When he looked up, he didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. What he saw was not Peck Wilson but some soft scared pukeface whose mind couldn’t stop running up against the bared teeth of the moment. What if they searched the car? What if they got his phone? They’d have Sandman’s number then and Sandman wouldn’t like that. And the house, what if Natalia gave up the address and they searched the house? The key documents were in a safe-deposit box, his bankbooks, passports and the like, but there was plenty there for them to find—the list of names and account numbers in his notebook, for one thing, though there was nothing incriminating in that because nothing had happened yet. They’d find papers though, utility bills, credit card receipts—M. M. Mako, Bridger Martin, Dana Halter. The lease. The car. And they’d trace that back to Bob Almond and the condo and the real estate lady. The fan clacked and stalled and clacked again. The deodorizer hissed. For a long moment he stared at a yellow streak on the wall where somebody had smashed a roach.
But maybe he was getting down over nothing. Maybe Natalia had done the smart thing and got out of there. They had his mother, of course, and his real name and his record now, but she didn’t know where he lived, and the thought of that—of where he lived—just opened up a hole in him till he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. There was no chance of keeping the place now—or was there? If he stayed strictly away from Peterskill, just as he’d intended to do in the first place, and made some real money so he could keep it for a weekend retreat or something…But then there was Bridger Martin. There was Dana Halter. And how in Christ’s name had they found him?
He was so wound up he jumped when the door pushed open and some old man with shoulders the width of a straight rule brushed past him to use the urinal, but then the sound of the jukebox—just a snatch of a tune, Marley, “No Woman, No Cry”—came to him and he caught his own gaze again in the mirror and he was Peck Wilson and he was all right. Very slowly, very carefully, all the while holding his own eyes, he washed his hands in a tight clench of powdered soap and lukewarm water, then took his time with the paper towels as the old man spat in the urinal and waited for his bladder to give it up. When he was finished, he went to the pay phone bolted to the wall in the narrow hallway just outside the men’s room, and dialed Natalia’s number.
While he listened to it ring, he gazed down the tunnel of the hallway to the deeper tunnel of the bar and his half-empty beer glass sitting there on the counter above the vacant barstool as if he were already gone, already wearing a different face in a different life in a different town. Three rings, four. And then there was a click and he got her voice mail: This is Natalia, I am not here now, please. Leave a message. Once the beep. He cursed, hung up, dialed again. “Pick up,” he kept saying under his breath, “pick up,” but she didn’t pick up. He must have tried five or six times in succession, pinning the heavy molded plastic receiver to his ear and getting progressively more frustrated and angry and scared each time he dialed, and then the old man blundered out of the bathroom and clipped him on the elbow with the edge of the door and he lost a quarter to the machine and felt as winnowed down and barren and empty as he’d ever felt in his life.
He went back to the bar, drained his beer and ordered another, and that was brilliant—get shit-faced. Sure, why not order a shot to go with it? Fuck up. Get loud. Stumble out into the street and take a cab straight to Greenhaven. “On second thought, cancel that,” he said, raising his voice so the bartender, who was already at the tap, could hear him. The man—forties, bald, chinless—looked over his shoulder and gave him a pained look. “I’m too bloated,” he said in apology, and the guy next to him, some fish-faced clown who might have looked familiar, glanced up, “you know what I mean?” He heard himself then, heard his voice taking on the local color, his accent coming back the way it did when he talked to Sandman on the phone from the coast. “Just gimme a Diet Coke, huh? Diet Coke, yeah. Lots of ice.”
Every five minutes for the next hour he went to the phone, trying her number over and over without success, and he was stalled, checkmated, because there was nothing he could do until he got hold of her and gauged the extent of the damage. He tried to think positively, tried to picture her backing out of the driveway and making her way through the grid of streets till she found Route 9 and went home and buried the car in the garage and waited for him to call. But if she was waiting for him to call, then why wasn’t she answering? And would she have taken the initiative to get out of there in the first place—or would she have just stood there, horrified, worrying about his mother and rehearsing his sins and watching Bridger Martin twist and kick on the grass while the sirens started in and people began to stick their heads out the door? Would she have waited for him, thinking that was the thing to do? Maybe. And in that case they were fucked, both of them. But he could also see her exploding in a fury of depilatory Russian curses, jerking round to stamp the flowers into the walk with her heel and then tearing off down the street in the car and everybody—him, especially—be damned. How he hoped that was the case, how he hoped…
The clown next to him—he could have been the bartender’s twin—kept saying, “You know, you look familiar,” and Peck kept denying it. Now the man leaned in till they were shoulder to shoulder and said, “I could swear—didn’t you go to Peterskill High?”
Peck shook his head.
“You have a brother, maybe?”
“No, no brother. I’m from California. Just trying to get hold of my wife—we’re going into New York, catch the sights. Times Square, that sort of thing, you know?”
He looked dubious. “But you grew up here, right?”
Peck made a show of shooting his cuff to glance at his watch. “No,” he said. “San Francisco. But my wife, you know?” he said, pushing himself away from the bar and making his way back to the phone. He dialed again, staring at the dirty buff-colored wall and the graffiti he’d already committed to memory, and it rang once, twice, and then she picked up.
“It is Natalia.”
“It’s me.”
Silence. Nothing. He heard the low buzz of the transmission, staticky and distant, and behind him the jukebox starting up and a sudden shout of laughter from somebody at the bar. “Natalia?”
“I hate you. You son of a bitch. I hate you!”
He shot his eyes down the length of the bar, cupped the speaker in his hand. “Where are you?”
“You are a liar. And a—a crook. Just like the crooks on TV—bad TV, daytime TV. You are—” and she began to cry in short drowning gasps.
“Where are you?”
“You lie to me. And to your mother. Your own mother.”
“Listen, it’s all right, everything’s going to be fine. Did they—did you drive home?”
Her voice came back at him, strong suddenly, fueled with outrage. “Drive? Drive what? They have taken the car. No, they have impounded, they say. And I am a sweated woman. I
am hungry. And who is to pick up Madison from camp, tell me who?”
“What did you tell them? Where are you now?”
She said something in Russian then, something grating and harsh, and broke the connection. He felt himself sinking. It was all over. Everything was over. That was when he felt a pressure on his arm, somebody poking him, and looked up into the face of some bloated loser in a black motorcycle T-shirt and a whole regalia store’s worth of rings, pendants and armbands. “You done, man? I mean, can I—?”
Jesus! He had to restrain himself here, because things could get very dark, very quickly. “One minute,” he said, redialing. “I got disconnected.”
But this clown wouldn’t take a hint. He just stood there, arms folded. “Don’t I know you?” he said.
“You don’t know me,” Peck said, and maybe he did. Was there a motorcycle involved here someplace? “Fuck off.”
“It is Natalia.”
He turned his back on the guy, cradled the receiver—and if he made a move, touched him, anything, he was dead—and tried to control his voice. “Take a cab,” he said. “Wherever you are, take a cab and meet me—”
“Wherever I am? I am in some, some ugly place in your ugly town where you grew up to be a liar and I do not even know your own name. Bridger Martin? The policeman says you are not Bridger Martin. You are not Da-na. William, does that ring a bell? Huh, William?”
