Cruisers Page 10

  “Welcome to the U.S.A.,” said Kohler.

  She was sweating, and she put her hand to her head. The Pakistanis glared. Kohler turned to them and said, “Do you have something to say?”

  “Me?” said the one with dark glasses. “What do I have to say to you?”

  The man with the turban moved closer, although he still stood on the curb.

  “We know how to deal with you,” said the man.

  “Would you like to try?” said Kohler.

  “What?” said the man with the dark glasses. “What did he say?”

  “Let’s go over there,” said Kohler. He gestured to a concrete barrier.

  Katryna tried to follow the English spoken by the Pakistanis, and while she obviously had trouble with the specific words, she had a good idea that something was wrong. She looked around, as though hoping to see a policeman, but all she saw was that red-tinted air. A line of perspiration, like a small clear mustache, was on her upper lip, and she was breathing through her mouth as though she was nauseated and trying to resist it. It had been a long trip, and the air here was rank with jet fuel. It was obviously hotter than she had thought it would be, and her sweater was too heavy. The fumes from the taxicabs in front of the building rose with an undulating movement. She gave them a queasy look and then glanced at Kohler. She swallowed again.

  “You think you can push me around because I am an immigrant?” said the man with the turban.

  “Over there,” said Kohler. He made a gesture with his head.

  The man with the turban glanced around. He stepped off the curb.

  “Oh, look. There,” said the woman in the traditional dress. She pointed at a man with a new suitcase who had just come through the door. Then all of them shrieked with pleasure and moved toward the edge of the police barricade, leaving Kohler next to the curb. The man with the turban glanced back, though, and then gave Kohler the finger.

  “Asshole,” said Kohler.

  “What?” said Katryna.

  He picked up Katryna’s bags and they started working their way through the crowd toward the parking lot, Katryna wobbling a little on her new high-heeled shoes. The asphalt had cracks in it through which grass grew, and the surface of the parking lot glittered with broken glass. The shards cast colored light on the ground, and the accumulation of reds and blues, yellows and sparkling silver left Kohler hesitant. The elemental colors, as though a secret were being revealed, left Kohler surprised and frankly alarmed, since as the fragments of light pierced him, each one at once festive and thoroughly mysterious, he was aware of that maddening, gentle, and yet universal presence which he had so often felt without warning recently. It was the hint of power that got to him, as though there was a love so inexhaustible that he would find himself weeping uncontrollably at the least sign of it, which is what that shattered light seemed to be—a sign, a hint, a promise that he wasn’t quite able to understand. Maybe that was his problem: he was trying too hard. Maybe he should just let himself go. Then, in that turmoil which seemed decorated by those flecks of light, he thought, Please. No fucking tears. Not now. His sense of fragility, which he detested, or his closeness to that abyss of sparkling light was all the worse because the Pakistani had flipped him the bird. Now, of course, he didn’t want to see the man in the turban. He just wanted to get away, as though flight would save him from making a fool of himself in front of Katryna.

  On Storrow Drive they went by the river, where sailboats gently moved along on their own blurry reflections. Katryna stared at them with disbelief, since it was incredible that anything as peaceful and serene as this could exist while she had been rushed so violently from one place to another.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee or something?” he said.

  She was still sweating. Yes, maybe something to eat would help to settle her stomach. He pulled off the highway and turned the car into the parking lot of a Burger King, the asphalt here as sparkling with broken glass as it had been at the airport. They went in through the front door and stood in line while the clerk, in a uniform, gave them a cup of coffee and a hamburger, french fries, and a Coke. Kohler was sweating too, now, with the effort to be cool. Maybe it was a mistake to come in here with so many things to worry about, the money, the change, the order, finding a place to sit, trying to smile, making sure they had napkins and a little thing like a tongue depressor to stir the coffee.

  He led them to a table that was screwed to the floor, but they could look out the window at the sky, with its big rags of clouds. Katryna unwrapped her sandwich and looked at it. Kohler smelled his coffee. She tried to take a bite of the sandwich, but instead her eyes filled. Kohler took a sip of his coffee, and then ran one hand through the buzz cut of his hair.

  “It’s the excitement,” she said. “I’m trembling. Look.”

  She put out her hand. The fingers were shaking.

  She put the back of her hand to the side of her face. Kohler looked out the window and saw that there was broken glass on the sidewalk here, too, and the light hit it in the same way as at the airport. A beautiful accumulation of reds, blues, yellows. He swallowed the hot coffee, resisting that moment which promised so much but delivered so little. It was like listening to choral music sung in a monastery. He bit his lip. Then he exhaled. She held her sandwich and looked around, obviously trying to decide how to handle this. He thought that if he was quick about it, he could get into the bedroom and clean up those rose petals before she saw them. She wiped her eyes with a paper napkin and blew her nose. Well, he thought, at least they hadn’t got lost at the airport, or had to page one another. They had met right where they said they would. She had seemed to like the car, and had even put a hand on the black leather, as if it were a skirt or a belt she had always wanted. She looked good against that background of darkness, like a diamond on a piece of black satin. He noticed she had stopped sweating and didn’t appear to be sick anymore. She carefully wrapped up the sandwich.

  “I’ll eat it later,” she said, and put it in her handbag.

  RUSSELL BOYD

  RUSSELL PULLED IN BEHIND THE CRUISER AT THE side of the road. The blue luminescence from the flashing lights swept over the woods and made them appear and disappear. The trunks looked smoky and blue for an instant before they vanished into the night, only to reappear when the blue lights of the cruiser hit them. It was early November and cold. The exhaust of the cruiser ahead of Russell’s rose like a white feather boa, and then Nowatarski, a trooper from Russell’s barracks, stepped through it like someone appearing out of the fog. He hesitated there, the boa of exhaust beginning to wrap itself around him. Then he came up to Russell’s window.

  “How’s it going?” said Russell.

  Nowatarski was over six feet tall, heavy, with a short haircut.

  “I want you to see something,” he said.

  Nowatarski looked back at those trees. The exhaust from his car was caught in that blue throb, too, and this made everything seem at once hyper-real and yet ethereal.

  “Have you got your flashlight?” said Nowatarski.

  Russell reached into his glove compartment, and as he glanced down he felt a little separate from the green phosphorescence of the gauges, the shotgun that sat in a rack behind his head, the papers and clipboard, the pen, his leather gloves that he had left on the seat when he was drinking a cup of coffee. The night seemed to be distilled into a substance that was thicker than usual, harder to walk through, more filled with unpleasant possibilities. Russell called the dispatcher and told her where he was.

  The body was next to a barbed-wire fence at the back of the mowed part of the shoulder of the road. The frost wasn’t hard, not way below freezing, but the ground was still firm. The woman was naked, without any marks (aside from stretch marks on her abdomen; she’d been pregnant at some time). It seemed obvious that she had been dumped there after being killed somewhere else. No clothes, no blood, no sign of a struggle, none of the trash that a murder makes. The woman’s nipples were torn. Russell look
ed around at the woods, and then at the woman again, before he was able to comprehend what had happened. Her nipples had been pierced, but in order to make it harder to identify her, her killer had ripped out the rings she had worn.

  “How did you find her?” Russell said.

  “Some guy had a flat tire. After he changed it, he came back here to take a leak.”

  “I’d like to cover her up,” Russell said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Everyone will be here soon. After they’ve had a look, we can get a blanket from the car.”

  “Doesn’t look like she’s been here very long,” Russell said.

  “Hard to say,” Nowatarski said.

  There was nothing to do but wait, and yet just standing there was like falling. He kept wanting to put his hand out to catch something, but the entire prospect was only made up of the blue, throbbing trunks of trees and blades of grass. And yet, in Russell’s disorientation, in the serpentine movement of the exhaust from the cars, he recognized something. It occurred to him, too, that while it might have been hard to prove, his grandfather had loved him. It was an odd kind of love, but nevertheless Russell understood that love had been behind his grandfather’s impulse to convey what it had been like to stand behind the wire and watch those Russians do their work. Something similar seemed to hang in the air here, too, just as it had when his grandfather had stared into that dull and yet horrifying afternoon. As Russell waited, he tried to decide just what it was he was trying to hang on to, his grandfather’s love or the certainty of what things are like when they go wrong. Whichever one, he was still left with the elusive sense of needing to get his hooks into what was going on here, or, better yet, needing to stop it. That was the hard part: he knew it was too late for anything like that. But, he thought, isn’t that what my grandfather was trying to tell me? That there are times when you are left with utter disbelief and with the certainty of just how ineffectual you can be? And then what do you do? Russell blinked and looked around.

  “Maybe we could put a roadblock in here and ask people who go by if they saw anything,” Russell said. “A car, someone walking on the side of the road.”

  “That’s probably where we’ll start,” Nowatarski said. “Have you had your lunch break?”

  “No,” Russell said.

  “Are you going to the pizza place at Exit One?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Russell said.

  Above those blue, throbbing trees, the stars were purple. Even now, though, they were still beautiful, and as Russell looked at them he guessed that if you could see beauty when you were standing at the side of the road like this, then it must be real, not sentimental or an acquired taste. Then Russell and Nowatarski walked back to the side of the road, where the van and another cruiser pulled up.

  JUST BEFORE DAWN, Russell came up to Zofia’s house and let himself in. There was still time before she had to get up, and he wanted to let her sleep a little while longer. He took off the body armor with a tear of Velcro and reached up to the shelf where they kept the coffee. He could see the first light outside beyond the trees, the sky pink and yellow. Then he stood with both hands on the counter, pressing down. Every noise he made in the kitchen was louder than it should have been, the clicking of the cupboard, the plastic snap as he opened the coffeemaker, so much so that he just hesitated, waiting there. What, after all, could he do? He was aware that he was trying to avoid a detail that left him speechless, and if he could just forget about it, or put it off until later, he wouldn’t have to admit to that hung-over feeling which he couldn’t shake. He took the scoop from the drawer, doing so as quietly as he could, and started measuring the spoonfuls of coffee into the brown paper filter. One, two, three, four. He closed the machine and hit the button, which made a red light come on. He thought of those pierced, torn nipples. Then he went back to standing at the counter, looking out the window. What was it that surrounded him there? What sensation bled off into the house? He wanted the house to be warm and comforting, and he strained to smell the first warm aroma of coffee, but the place resisted him. It still was empty and cold.

  He went upstairs, carrying the body armor, and stood in the hall. He could tell that Zofia was awake. It was as though when she opened her eyes, the room had a small charge that wasn’t there when she was sleeping. He went in and sat down on the bed, putting the armor on the chair by her dressing table. She was on her back, looking at the ceiling.

  “You’re late,” she said. It was both a statement and an implied question.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The coffee will be ready in a minute. You’ll be able to smell it.”

  They heard the gurgle of the machine downstairs. He put the pistol on the nightstand and lay down next to her in his clothes. He was careful not to touch her, or to intrude on that moment when she was waking up and getting ready to face the rest of the day, the kids at school, the people she had to keep happy, parents, the principal. He thought that the best way to get what he needed, or to let the house warm up, was to make no noise and to lie next to her, doing nothing at all. Slowly the memory of that blue light, those frozen eyelashes, that distilled darkness began to recede. Then Zofia threw back the covers and walked across the floor.

  In the sound of her splashing and brushing, in the smell of the coffee coming from downstairs, he wanted to be precise, and he supposed his revulsion at what he had found in that blue light was not only a reflection of his sense of an unnecessary and stupid travesty, but it was powered, too, by his own sense of mortality. What did you do in the face of that? You had to be sure you were never maudlin, that you looked at things clearly. Well, surely he had done that tonight.

  She came back into the room and sat down next to him, toothpaste on her breath.

  “You know what I would like to do?” he asked.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “I would like to spend the morning here with you,” he said. “The light would come in and touch your skin. We’d sit here, feeling it creep up over us like a warm caress.”

  “And what would I do about work today?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Or maybe we could do something else. We could go up to a pond I know, a quarry, where we could swim naked. It would be so cold, and then we could dry in the sunlight. The shock of it would take our breath away.”

  “Ummmmm,” she said.

  “Or maybe we could plan a garden for the spring,” he said.

  “What would you like to plant?” she said.

  “I don’t know what they’re called,” he said. “Tall blue flowers.”

  “Delphinium,” she said.

  He knew he would say this at night, when he was thinking of her. Delphinium.

  “Delphinium,” he said, the buzz of the final m on his lips as he put them against her neck.

  “And peonies,” she said, “big pink ones.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds nice.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “All right what?” he said.

  “I’ll call in,” she said, glancing at the clock on the bed, the color of the numerals on it the same color as the readout on the radar. “If I call early enough they can get a substitute.” As she called, he closed his eyes and tried, for an instant, to make the memory of that blue, throbbing light disappear, or change into the deep blue of the delphinium. It wouldn’t last long, but it was a place to start. She hung up and said, “So, what happened last night?”

  FRANK KOHLER

  KOHLER LIKED DRIVING THE CAR WITH KATRYNA asleep against the door, which he was able to lock by pushing a button. It was a small thing, that thunk of the locking of the door, but it was the sound of taking care of someone. She woke up when he stopped in front of their house, and she looked at the weathered siding and the tin roof, her eyes sweeping over the house with the deliberate cadence of a beacon from a lighthouse. They brought Katryna’s bags in and put them on the living room floor.

  In the kitchen she opened and closed the cupboards, glanc
ing at the dishes and glasses, and then she stood at the stove and looked at the pots that hung above it. Her finger went back and forth over the black handle of the teakettle, and after a moment, as though looking for a way to be reassured, she went to one of her bags and searched for the tea she had brought from Russia.

  “I got a new teapot,” said Kohler.

  It was blue, and he took it from the shelf and held it with both hands. Then he left it on the counter and filled the kettle, after letting the water run clear, and put it on the stove with a clatter. The flames came on.

  “Strange how long it takes water to boil,” he said.

  She stood there by the window, looking out to where the field ran up against the wall of the woods. Then the kettle began to boil. She put the tea into the pot and poured in the water, a little wisp of steam coming up out of it, and when she swirled the water around in the pot she didn’t put it down, but stood there, holding it by the handle, under her breasts.

  He put new cups on the table. He knew from her letters that she liked to have tea in the afternoon, how it was a small thing she depended on, and he had written back to say that in the Russian novels he was reading they were always putting the samovar on, which he imagined as a variety of Russian Buddha. She poured the tea and they sat down.

  “It’s like Russia here,” she said.

  “I thought you’d like it,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “What did you eat on the plane?” he asked.

  Her eyes were as blue as those pictures you see in magazines of the ocean in the Caribbean. Bright. Piercing. Her skin was white and soft-looking, as though she had never been in the sun.

  “It was wrapped in plastic,” she said. “Chicken. Broccoli. I don’t know.”

  She sipped her tea and closed her eyes. The spoons and cups clinked when they picked them up and put them down. She turned to look out the window again.