“Well don’t you look nice,” Elaine said, finding her voice.
Rosa was toting a plastic bag that Elaine guessed contained Harvey’s dirty clothes. She turned and pushed past him into the bathroom, intent on some new mission of purification. Harvey craned his neck after her, tilted his old, well-scrubbed head in such a way, smiled in such a way, the corners of his mouth twitching with happy secrets, that Elaine, watching, was made aware of an entirely new problem.
More Secrets
Officer Mitchell Crook’s hand rose toward his mustache, then lowered. “Step out of the car please, Miss.”
“Absolutely. No problem. Yes sir.” Babbling idiot. Josie fumbled around for her various body parts. She wasn’t drunk, she was something else, brimful of everything, the crazy night, the heat, fear still sweating out of her every pore, plus the way he looked, different, not just the mustache. People always looked like a mask of themselves in the dark. The sort-of dark. Red and blue lights were whirlygigging all over the place. Maybe she was a little drunk. She scrambled out of the car and kept her chin tucked down so he couldn’t smell her breath. But she peeked up at him through her eyelashes, all trembly. It was either a miracle, or one more stupid Springfield small-town coincidence.
“Do I know you?”
She wobbled her head no. She was the one who knew him.
“Stand over here, please.” He shined his flashlight inside the car, reached down and stirred the heap of empty beer cans, held one up. She’d forgotten about the empties. “What’s this?”
The mustache was killer. It made him look like a movie star, no, better. She was trying to hold on to every second, every eyeful of him, but her head was full of fizz and her heart was a clanging gong and she couldn’t slow anything down. It was as if he was already a memory, had already escaped her senses.
When she didn’t answer, he said, “Maybe you could tell me where your buddies went.”
Josie pointed down the alley, empty except for the streetlight, so white it was nearly purple.
“And who was it chasing you back there?”
“Bunchofguys.”
“What guys? Look at me. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”
“Oh yes.” Wobble-nodding.
“Turn your pockets inside out.”
It was harder than she would have expected. Her hands didn’t fit inside the way they used to. She bet she looked like absolute shit, all sweaty, and she hadn’t even worn anything nice. “Sorry,” she said, giving up.
“Driver’s license?”
Josie pointed to her string bag on the front seat of the car. She watched Mitchell Crook retrieve it, bending because he was tall. Why was he a cop, she wanted to ask him, what put that idea in his head? Was it dangerous? Meaning the real criminals, not little punks like her. This was probably totally boring for him.
“All right, Josephine—”
“Josie.” A great blessing settled over her. Whatever else happened, he would know her name.
“—let’s have you take a seat back here.” He opened the rear door of the squad car. “Watch your head.” She wanted to point out the strangeness of all this to him, how it had happened before, or almost had, all the times she’d imagined it, but of course he didn’t know that. She sank into the vinyl seat, which felt a little sticky under her bare legs. She was inside the whirlygig lights now. They stabbed through her head, redblue, redblue. Her little car stood with all its doors flung open, something unseemly about it, as if it was being undressed in public. She wondered about Moron and Ronnie and that jerk Podolsky. She hoped they had to walk miles and miles to get home. She was just beginning to take hold of the thought that very bad things had almost happened to her, and that other bad things might still happen.
Where was Mitchell Crook? She’d lost sight of him and had to shift around to get a better view. He was kneeling in the front seat of her car, where there was probably something illegal in the ashtray or ground into the carpet. His beautiful head was visible just above the seat back. He was actually inside her car. A little of her breath came out in a moan. She reached up and touched the metal grate between her and the front seat. Locked in a cage, with all her heart on the other side. What sadness that there were always two halves of her, the stupid kid who did everything wrong and her true, feeling self.
He came back around to the front of the squad car, got in, and without turning around to look at her, switched on the dome light and began writing on a clipboard. Between his dark blue collar and the dark clipped edge of his hair was half a hand’s width of skin, marble swirled with pink. She reached one fingertip toward it, resting on the metal screen. In the rearview mirror she saw her own eyes, yearning like a saint’s in an old holy picture, and his eyes looking back at her.
“You sure I don’t know you from someplace?”
“No place you’d remember.” Saints, God, heaven: What was any of that, only words people shook in your face and told you were important? None of it was real or meant anything compared to this very minute, his perfect skin and the space her finger could not travel.
The radio squawked and he spoke into it, something private and businesslike, then he did turn around to look at her. His eyebrows were two perfect dark velvet strokes. “Suppose you tell me what happened tonight.”
“I saw this guy I know at Denny’s and I gave him and his friends a ride home, but then they made me drive over here and all of a sudden this other car, a Jeep or a Blazer or something, was shooting at us. Then they split, I guess because you showed up, and those guys made me pull over and ran off and left me here.”
Josie blinked, trying to look as stupid as she sounded. Well, that was pretty much what had happened. Mitchell Crook gave her a guilty-till-proven-innocent look. “And the friend you met at Denny’s, what’s his name?”
“Brian.” There was no particular reason for her to protect them, but she figured the less anyone knew, the better.
“Brian what?”
“I don’t know, he’s not really a friend. I just see him at school.”
“Him and how many friends?”
“Two,” she said promptly. The truth.
“And while you were making the run from Denny’s over to these parts, they had time to drink nine beers?”
Sullen now, she scuffed at the back of the seat. She felt injured that he didn’t believe her.
“And the guys that were shooting at you, any idea who they were, why they were so unhappy with your pals?”
“They’re all a bunch of creeps and I hope they do get shot.” In spite of herself she was sniveling, she was so tired, and someone really had pointed a gun at her, and now she’d ruined everything by being an idiot. A boo-hooing idiot with a crust of snot and dirt underneath her nose because she didn’t even have a stupid Kleenex. She was really crying now. It was like vomiting, the way a little got you started. She was bawling. Josie the Crying Cow.
“Hey,” Mitchell Crook said. “Hey, come on, you’re OK.” No she wasn’t. What did he know. Even his sympathy was professional and impersonal. There was a metal grate between everything she had imagined and the way it was really happening, between Mitchell Crook as she had cast him in a hundred different dramas and the fact of him who was not in love back with her.
It was too bad, really, that you couldn’t go on crying. Sooner or later it trailed off into runny sniffs and whimpering and you were right back where you started. She didn’t even want to look at him now. She folded her arms and glowered.
“You know, you’re actually a very lucky girl.”
She shrugged, to indicate just how lucky she didn’t feel.
“For one thing, you didn’t get hurt tonight. But if you keep hanging out with creeps, you will.”
“I didn’t even—”
“—know those guys, right. So don’t get into a car with guys you don’t know.”
She slit her eyes and mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“Yeah, OK, whatever. Righ
t.”
“Now what I’m going to do is file a report. And if you turn up again riding around with lowlifes or some other monkey business, then we’ll let the juvenile authorities sort it out.”
Important cop voice. Like she was just a little kid.
He sighed and plucked his shirt collar away from his neck, as if the heat was getting to him. “You listening back there?”
Total power trip. Nya nya. Josie tried her Tough Girl sneer, couldn’t get the proper lift to it. Couldn’t even pretend to be angry at him. Every time she looked at him she felt the cheap crockery in her chest break all over again.
“OK, we’re leaving your car here and I’m going to take you home.”
She gaped at him. “Really?”
“Like I said, you’re lucky. This time, at least.”
His eyes flicked over her in the mirror, then he turned off the dome light, had another conversation with the radio, shut off the flashers—she sighed at the welcome dark—and put the car in gear. Josie watched the streets glide past, familiar landmarks and intersections, everything small, dull, dopey, ugly in unspectacular ways. She’d have to tell her mother the car had broken down, she’d have to get a ride from Tammy and lie her way through it all, but that would be just more same old same old in the endlessly stupid story of her life. She wondered a little about Mitchell Crook’s working the night shift; it was apparent that she had lost track of something, but it didn’t matter because all that was over now.
“Is this you?” he asked, gliding up to her house, which was, mercifully dark. Her mother not sitting up to see her inglorious return. Josie said yes it was, and waited while he got out to let her out of the backseat. He opened the door and stepped aside. The night was still not cool, but it was as if the heat held its breath. Everything was silent, a flat, black, outer-space silence. A burnt smell, the neighborhood’s overfertilized grass going down to defeat. What had happened to the moon? A lightbulb switched off. “I need my bag,” she told him.
He retrieved it from the front seat and held it out to her. And because she would never see him again, and because no one in the whole blind dark world was watching, she reached up on her toes and kissed him on the mouth.
It didn’t last long. She released him before he had a chance to struggle and pull back, which would be the final humiliation. She tasted the inside of his mouth, a strong taste, not unpleasant, but full of currents of history and possibility, his lips a little apart in surprise or shock, his skin full of heat and salt, the column of his neck beneath her hands—all this she held, then let go.
Sprinting away without looking back, she prayed that her key would work without fumbling and it did, and she was able to get inside and put the door between them. Standing just at the edge of the window curtain, she saw the squad car sitting at the curb, its engine muttering. She wanted to think it looked perplexed, although that was foolish, almost as foolish as what she had done, and yet her blood raced like electricity and once more she felt reckless and triumphant. Whatever else happened or never happened, she had for one moment made the world take the shape she wanted.
When Josie woke up the next day—really woke up, because earlier her mother had pounded on her door, alarmed about the car, but she’d gone back to sleep—she had to convince herself again and again that everything was real, not just last night, but herself this morning, here in her own bed, like always. Her real self could not have done those things. She kept holding up the night before her memory and shaking her head, and sometimes she grinned a randy little grin and sometimes she groaned and threw her head against the pillow.
The phone rang from somewhere beneath the bed. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. Two three four rings, then it stopped just before the machine clicked on. Josie broke out in a rolling sweat. Whatever, whoever it was, it had to be bad. The phone started up again and this time she dived for it. “H’lo.”
“God, what’s it take to get you to answer?”
Tammy. She flopped back on the bed, unstrung. “Give me a break.”
“What, don’t tell me you’re still asleep. You slut.”
“Time sit?”
“Almost two, loser. What did you do last night?”
Her scalp itched furiously. She clawed at it. “Last night?”
“Yeah, or is it one of the ones you don’t remember?” Tammy laughed. Ha ha. Bitch. “Because, what’s your car doing over by the post office?”
“Everybody’s always so interested in my car.”
“What?”
Josie said never mind, and she told Tammy the sequence of lies that she had already rehearsed, or maybe she had already spoken them, or maybe things had actually happened that way, since what she remembered was so much more improbable: her car had broken down and she’d had to call her mother for a ride home, and could Tammy pick her up in an hour to go deal with it?
She hung up the phone and squeezed her eyes shut so that only a little smeared daylight came through. After a while she got up and went into the bathroom and splashed cold water over her face. And although her head felt like it was full of sand and her mouth was puffy, as if she’d taken a sting along with the kiss, she was struck by her own shining image. Her mussed hair looked weirdly all right, good, even, like a model’s when they mussed it on purpose. The light from the window filtered through it in a sunny tangle. Her skin, through some trick of the same light, was perfect, like the inside of a summer fruit, and her eyes were full of liquid depths and her eyebrows shadowed them with mystery. She was beautiful. Who would have thought it.
Four days later, she was hopelessly sunk back in her same old life. Her shift at Beefeater’s was sagging to its close. There were only three diners in the place and usually she’d be off by now, but the pimp manager was in an evil mood and said she could goddamn well earn her pay for once. Josie might have said something sarcastic back to him except it wouldn’t change anything, wouldn’t make him any less of a pimp. She listened to the thin, annoying music that squeezed out of the speakers in the ceiling. It must be computer generated, because surely no human being could make a conscious decision to produce that kind of noise. At least it masked the sound of people chewing, very thoroughly, their stringy meat. She’d stopped stalking Mitchell Crook. She’d given up on being anything but ordinary.
After the first surge of glee at her own daring had worn off, she’d felt shame, then more shame, and a kind of angry hopelessness. What a stupid stunt, little kid stuff, really, something they used to do at recess, pretend to kiss the boys so they’d run away. She actually remembered doing that. Kisserbug, they’d called it. Cute, if you were in the second grade. And so gradually, the physical memory of him, his taste and feel and hot smell, were erased by the sneering inner voice that always knew the very worst thing to say.
It was after ten o—clock when she left work and paused just outside the door. Behind her the restaurant’s lights were dimmed so that they looked more lonesome than complete darkness would have. She hesitated because she had absolutely nowhere to go except back home. Maybe that’s what she should do. Except her mother was probably still awake, and these days it was just as hard to explain why she was home early as why she stayed out late.
Josie dug her keys out, took three steps across the parking lot, and stopped. A black Acura with a sunroof was pulled up next to her car. The driver’s window was open and someone’s arm was resting along the door, the fingers keeping time to the radio music she could only just hear, the thread of an old Beatles song, the one about Sexy Sadie: you know you turned on every wu-un, you know you turned on everyone.
Not knowing what to think, Josie crossed the lot and bent down to stick her head in the window. “Hey.”
Mitchell Crook wasn’t smiling, wasn’t even really looking at her. Was she in some new kind of trouble? “You work here?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw your car,” he explained after a moment.
“Oh.”
“Beefeater’s,” he said reflectivel
y. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten here.”
She shrugged, looking back at the restaurant. “Well, it kind of sucks.”
The Beatles song ended and a commercial came on, nothing he could pretend to pay attention to, so he fiddled with the tuner until he found another music station. God, he was acting weird, like a cop who’d forgotten how to arrest people. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, but a green T-shirt and jeans. The neck of the shirt fell below one side of his collar bone. A new territory for her greedy eyes. Since he wasn’t saying anything, she prompted, “Do you have to work tonight?”
“Yeah, in a little while. So, you want to tell me what all that was about the other night?”
“What all what was about?” But in that instant she knew, both what he meant and everything that would follow.
“Maybe you should get in the car.”
“Front or back seat?” Josie asked, and he looked as if he wasn’t sure it was supposed to be funny, as she’d meant it to be, then he reached over and unlatched the passenger door. She took her time walking around the front of the car where he could see her, because this time she was wearing something really good. Her pink sundress that was low and bare on top. As she walked she tried to rearrange herself without being obvious.
Once she was in the car she was glad for the music. Neither of them knew what to say or even how to look at each other. Josie crossed her legs carefully at the ankle. She especially wanted him to notice her legs. Mitchell Crook pretended not to be watching them. He turned around with his back against the door so he was facing her. “OK, so where do you know me from?”
“You really don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
She shook her head, mourning. “And here I thought it was so special.”
He finally figured out she was teasing. “Jeez.”
“Boy, you must have a guilty conscience.”
Wide Blue Yonder Page 11
