Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  “Hey, man, listen—” The loser was there at his back, but he was nothing because he understood what was going down here, what Peck was radiating, and the discussion was over. “I mean, this isn’t your fucking living room, man—give somebody else a chance, you know? Public. It’s a public phone.”

  One look for him, one look over his shoulder, the Sandman look, and the guy backed off, taking his fat-laden shoulders and fat wounded ass back to the bar, putting on as much of a show as he could muster. Settling himself on a barstool now, picking up a glass of whatever shit he was drinking and scowling into the mirror in back of the bar as if to remind himself what a badass he was underneath his fat exterior. “Never mind about that, not now. I’ll make it up to you, I will—”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will.”

  “No, you won’t.” She paused to draw in a breath. “Do you know why? Why is because I will not be here. I am leaving. I am picking up Madison in the taxi and I am going to my brother because he is not a liar and a crook. You hear me?”

  “What did you tell them?” he said. “Did you tell them where we live?”

  There was a silence. He thought he could hear her breaking down again. The smallest voice: “Yes.”

  “Oh, fuck. Fuck. What’s wrong with you? Huh? Tell me. Why would you tell them where we live?”

  “I was scared. They are threatening. They say they will—” Her voice fell off. “My green card. They will take my green card.”

  He felt cold suddenly, the air-conditioning getting to him, the beer weakening him till he could barely hold the phone to his ear. “What did you tell them about me?”

  “What I know. That you are a liar. And a thief.”

  He wanted to get a grip on this, wanted to command her, but he couldn’t find the right tone of voice and he felt the control slipping away from him. “Please,” he heard himself say. “Please. I’ll tell you where to meet me—you can be here in ten minutes. We’ll pick up Madison together and—”

  “I am going now,” she said, very softly, as if it were a prayer. And then she broke the connection.

  He dropped the phone. Let it dangle on its greasy cord. Then he turned and walked the length of the room as if he were walking the gauntlet and when the loser at the bar tried to block his way, tried to say something about a Harley Electra Glide, he just set him down hard and went out the door and into the heat, and if he slammed a shoulder into some drunk in an aloha shirt who was trying to light a cigarette and negotiate the door at the same time, well, so what? He wasn’t responsible, not at that moment. Not anymore. And how he managed to wind up with the guy’s cell phone tucked away in the inside pocket of his jacket, he couldn’t have begun to imagine.

  Two

  IN THOSE FLEETING FURIOUS SECONDS Peck Wilson spoke to her without words, spoke as clearly and unambiguously as if he were tapped into her consciousness, his internal voice wrapped round her own till it shouted her down and made her quail. He’d lost control. She could see it in his eyes, in his movements, in the look that passed between them like the snap of a whip, and Bridger had lost control too. No matter that he’d lectured her over and over on keeping their distance, keeping their cool, identifying the man and his car and staying clear till the danger had passed and the police could move in and handle the situation—when it came down to it, the sudden proximity was too much for him. They were walking hand in hand through the pall of heat radiating up from the saturated earth, trying to look casual and pedestrian, and then the car appeared right in front of them, pulling into the drive and sliding to a stop just clear of the walk. The engine died. Both doors swung open. And there he was, Peck Wilson, emerging from the car, the rigid barbered slash of hair at the back of his neck and the tapering dagger of a sideburn, his summer suit and open-necked shirt. He had the stuffed toy under one arm and he was looking straight ahead, his eyes on his mother and the little girl standing there on the porch. And then his wife the liar got out too, dressed as if she were going to a cocktail party. Dana froze in mid-step.

  That was when Peck Wilson swung his head reflexively to the right and the look passed between them, the first look, the look that went from shock to fear to rage in an instant, and before she could think or act Bridger was rushing him. The toy fell to the ground. The sun stabbed through the trees. There was the sudden clash of their bodies, a dance Peck Wilson knew and Bridger didn’t, balletic and swift. And then Bridger was down and thrashing from side to side and Peck Wilson stood over him, aiming his deliberate kicks, and she was screaming, all the air inside her compressed and constricted and forcing its way through the squeeze box of her larynx. He glanced up at her, and there was the whipcrack of that second look so that she knew what he would do before he did, and when he came for her, when he snatched at her wrist, she wasn’t there. She ran. She had no choice. Bridger was on the ground. Her blood recoiled and she was gone.

  In that moment, she was cleansed of thought: there was nothing in her head but to run. She had no plan, no focus or rationale. Escape, that was all. Get away. Run. Suddenly she was running, and she’d never run harder or faster in her life, unable to hear the ragged tear of his breathing and the propulsion of his footsteps or to gauge where he was, afraid to look over her shoulder, afraid of everything, and why wouldn’t somebody stop him? She wanted to cry out but she had no breath to spare. Her arms pumped, her legs found their rhythm and she went straight through the intersection, snatching a glance over her shoulder finally to see him right there, right behind her, sprinting for all he was worth and no quit in him, his eyes cold and dead, his lips drawn tight. She didn’t dare look again. Her gaze ran ahead of her, scanning the uneven slabs of concrete for the fatal snag, looking to the old woman shuffling toward her with her shopping bags strung over both arms, calculating her chances at the next light and then the next one beyond that, because there was no stopping no matter what, no hope but to out-run him, out-maneuver him, out-last him. If he caught her he was going to hurt her, swiftly, deeply, without quarter or restraint. He’d told her that much already. And there was no mistaking his meaning.

  The van—the white van, the moving wall of it that appeared and stretched and snapped till it was gone—cost her a step, a beat, and his fingers tore at her hair and she felt her head jerked back and she couldn’t have stopped if she’d wanted to. Then there was the other car, the force that slapped her, stung her, knocked her to the pavement, his body flung there beside hers and the heat of him rising to her nostrils like some toxin. She was up again, bewildered, dazed, both knees scraped and bleeding and her palms and forearms on fire—Run! a voice screamed inside her, Run!—but she didn’t have to run, didn’t have to do anything, because the police cruiser was sliding into the intersection and Peck Wilson was done.

  For one long thundering moment she held his gaze, saw the vacancy there, the fear, the retreat, and she trembled all over, the most ridiculous thing, as if she’d caught a chill on the hottest day of the year. She didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know what was happening to her. “You go to hell,” she said, feeling the triumph surge up in her.

  They stood there side by side, not two feet apart, as the men from the car, the black men, came at them, flailing their arms and working their mouths, people gathering, the door of the police cruiser catching the light as it flung open and everyone looked to the blue-black uniform, the nightstick and revolver and the visored cap. He was going to run, she knew it. He was going to run and she had to stop him. She jerked round, too wrought up to notice who was inhabiting that uniform and fingering that nightstick or to see where this was going, where it had been going all along, inevitably, one long downward spiral from the day the microbes invaded her body and she stopped living in the world of the hearing. She watched his face change. Watched his eyes settle. And then the cop stepped between them and she was looking into a face she recognized, fury there, fury and disbelief, and she knew she was on trial all over again.

  What she remembered most, what sh
e would always remember, was the way they failed her. She tried to marshal her words but she was overwhelmed, heaving for air—“Him,” she kept saying, jerking a finger at Peck Wilson, “he’s the one, arrest him”—but P. Runyon wasn’t listening, and at some point in the silent shuffle of bodies and faces and the shock of the way P. Runyon seized her arm and held it in a tight unyielding grip, she looked up and saw that Peck Wilson wasn’t where he’d been a moment before. He wasn’t in the cruiser or in the custody of the other cop, the older one with the drooping face, who was busy with the two black men and their windmilling arms and snapping teeth. She felt the panic rising in her and she jerked her arm back. She looked wildly round her, spinning once, twice, the crowd giving back her stare out of indifferent eyes, the trees whirling overhead, shirts, blouses, jeans, shorts. Officer Runyon laid a hand on her again and again she jerked back. Couldn’t they see what was happening here? “Peck Wilson,” she shouted as if it was the only name she knew, and she shouted it again and again, till all the air had gone out of her.

  By the time the interpreter arrived, it was too late. She’d tried to tear away, burning with her urgency, tried to thread through the crowd and fling herself back down the street to that house and the silver-haired woman on the porch—Ask her, she’ll have the answers, ask her—but P. Runyon wouldn’t hear of it. Only then did she think of Bridger. Was he hurt? Or was it just bruises, aches, something he could shake off the way people did in the movies? She felt a flutter of fear rise in her throat: why wasn’t he here, why wasn’t he adding his voice to the mix? He could explain. He could tell her, this lady cop with the starved lips and grabby hands and the eyes that started at zero and went down from there. Where was he? Where? She had her answer a moment later when the ambulance nosed up to the curb, lights flashing, and P. Runyon waved the driver angrily on, releasing her grip on Dana’s arm to point down the street in two quick chops as if she were flinging something away from her. “Who—?” Dana asked, but couldn’t finish the thought.

  Officer Runyon actually had her handcuffs out—she was shaking them in Dana’s face, warning her to calm herself down or she’d have no choice but to take her into custody—when the interpreter pulled up in a nondescript black car with the city logo on the door. She was small, neat, young, her features already in motion as she crossed the street and stepped between the two of them. “What’s the matter?” she asked and signed it simultaneously.

  “He was chasing me. He wanted to hurt me. Peck,” Dana said, “Peck Wilson.”

  The interpreter looked to P. Runyon and she just shrugged. “That’s all she can talk about. She’s hysterical.”

  Who is Peck Wilson? the woman signed, turning to Dana and shutting out the officer.

  The thief. He stole my identity. And he chased me, he—

  Where is he?

  Where is he? The question cut right through her. She couldn’t help herself, couldn’t pull away from it, the rage and frustration and the sick irony that was like some sort of cosmic joke, and suddenly she was sobbing. The interpreter dropped her hands to her sides and then lifted them again and embraced her. There was a long suspended moment, the stranger clinging to her in a crowd of strangers, and then she gently disengaged herself. She didn’t brush the hair away from her face or dab at her eyes, but instead brought her right hand to her forehead and swept it out, open-palmed: I don’t know, she signed. But I know where his mother is.

  At the hospital, she sat in a hard plastic chair in the emergency room with the interpreter on one side and a detective from the Peterskill Police Department on the other. It was evening now, Saturday evening, and there was a momentary lull in the drift of patients pressing bloodied rags to their shins and arms and foreheads as the late afternoon gave way to night and the alcohol-fueled trauma to come. She was feeling jittery—she’d drained three cans of diet cola and was thirsty still—and her right knee was stinging where they’d dug bits of gravel and dirt out of the pad there and cleaned and dressed the wound. She had a matching square of gauze beneath the left knee, but the right seemed to have taken the brunt of it—that was where the pain was, anyway. The interpreter—her name was Terri Alfano, she was twenty-six years old and possessed of a pair of dark wide-set eyes that absorbed hurt and confusion and delivered up absolution in their place, and Dana didn’t know how she would have gotten through this without her—had asked for some clarification on the timing of the incident, and the detective who’d posed the question, his pen poised over a pad of paper, seemed to have drifted off as they signed back and forth.

  The problem now—the concern, the worry, the fear that was booming inside her with a dull echoing horror—wasn’t Peck Wilson or his mother or wife or the wine-red Mercedes the police were impounding until legal ownership could be established, but Bridger. Bridger was somewhere behind the swinging doors in back of the nurse’s desk, beyond the expressionless patients slumped in the rows of molded plastic chairs and the TV on the wall that was tuned, in another sick intrusion of irony, to an overwrought drama about emergency room doctors. They hadn’t told her much, and what they had told her she wasn’t getting at all until Terri Alfano wrote it down for her: Bridger, it seemed, was having trouble breathing and they’d done an emergency tracheotomy. He’d suffered laryngeal trauma and they were going to have to operate in order to clear the air passage and repair damage to the thyroid cartilage. That was the problem. That was why she was sitting here watching the clock and the swinging doors and the face of the nurse every time she jerked her eyes to the phone and picked it up.

  An hour crept by, then another. The detective was gone now, long gone, and the waiting room had begun to fill again. Dana paged through a magazine and watched people’s faces as they shuffled in and out the door on the arms of relatives and friends, their features tugged and twisted round the flash point of their suffering eyes. There had been no news of Bridger, and as the light failed beyond the windows and the night settled in, she turned to Terri Alfano and told her she might as well go home. “You don’t have to sit here and keep me company, you know,” she said aloud, though she didn’t mean it. She was glad for the company, desperate for it. She was confused and hurting, crushed with guilt over Bridger—it was her fault, the whole thing, involving him in this in the first place and then dragging him all the way out here, and for what? She shouldn’t have been so hardheaded. She should have let it go. Should have left it to the police and the credit card companies instead of playing amateur detective, instead of taking it personally, as if the thief could have cared who she was, as if it mattered, as if she mattered. What was she thinking? But the worst thing, the thing that haunted her as she stared at the floor and shifted in her seat and raised her eyes to look at the nurse and the clock and the swinging doors that never swung open and gave up nothing, was leaving him when he needed her most, when he couldn’t breathe, when he was clutching at his throat and thrashing on the pavement with the pain that should have been hers. There was a moral calculus here, and she’d failed it.

  “It’s all right. I’m fine.” Terri was idly turning the pages of one of the magazines Dana had been twice through already. She sat very still, her back arched, exuding calm. She was wearing a gray skirt with a matching jacket and a rose-colored blouse, very professional, prim almost, but she wasn’t cold or rigid in the least, unlike so many interpreters—Iverson and his ilk. Little people who wanted to make themselves big at the expense of somebody else, somebody they could dominate in an ongoing psychodrama of mastery and dependency.

  “Really,” she said, setting down the magazine. “I know you’ve got better things to do—”

  Terri shrugged, held her palms out, smiled. They’d already talked about her boyfriend, how she could barely think of anything else though it had been six months since he’d moved to the Midwest for a job opportunity he just couldn’t pass up and how she was waiting for him to come back for her. They’d talked about her parents, both of them deaf—mother father deaf, she signed—and how she’d been
interpreting for them all her life, talked about shitty pay and long hours and the obligation she felt to the deaf community. And the guilt. Not to mention the guilt. They’d talked about Bridger, about the San Roque School. About Peck Wilson. “Believe me,” she said, signing under it, “it’s okay. I want to stay. What if the doctor needs to tell you something—I don’t know, something important? Crucial even?”

  “I can read him.”

  “Medical terms?”

  “He can write them down.”

  There was a pause. They both looked up to watch an elderly woman in slippers and housedress navigate the room to the admittance desk like a sad old prow on a breezeless sea. Terri’s face bloomed. Do you really want me to go? she signed.

  Dana shook her head. And then, for emphasis, two quick snaps of the index and middle fingers to the thumb: No.

  It was past nine when the nurse who’d first spoken with them came through the swinging doors. She was wearing scrubs, replete with the soft crushed hat, and there was a suggestive stain, something dark and blotted, knifing across one hip. They both stood to receive her and as she made her way across the room, Dana could read her expression and her body language—she was satisfied with herself; everything was okay—so that when the nurse was standing there before them with a propped-up smile and telling them that Bridger was going to be fine, she already knew the gist of it. The details were something else. They’d implanted a polymeric silicone stent—“Could you write that down, please?”—to prevent granulation tissue from forming on the exposed cartilage, but he’d be released the following day and the prognosis was good. Full recovery. Though he wouldn’t be able to speak for a period of two to three weeks and there might be some residual voice change.

  “Residual voice change?” Dana looked from Terri to the nurse.