Cruisers Page 25

  He tried to read such books as Livy’s War with Hannibal and The March Upcountry, which he tried to understand as men making effort in the face of impossible odds, and yet it wasn’t the effort he needed or wanted. He was ready to make effort. It was a notion of certainty that he craved, and the desire to know what kept these human beings from panic.

  The weeks passed. He thought that his task was to distinguish between anxiety and fear, and how do you do that? In the midst of a snowstorm, when the stuff came down in long, white ropes, like twine, he realized that he would have to go back to work. What else did he have?

  The first afternoon he dressed and went out to the cruiser, where he took the tuning fork from the glove box of the car to check the radar. Then he got in, behind the wheel, with the sandwich in a bag on the seat next to him. At least his desire to be alert was informed by an understanding of loneliness, which was something new. A knowledge of loneliness goes hand in hand, he thought, with a knowledge of the chaotic. He swallowed when he sat in the car and put the tuning fork away. He was slowly working his way around a central, essential matter, and he didn’t know what made him more uneasy: the circuitous way he was working, or the thing that he was going around. He had to do and not do at the same time, to be afraid and not afraid, and how did that happen in the moment, in the instant that was about to shatter?

  He had a dream that was so obvious as to leave him ashamed of its lack of symbolism. He dreamed he was with a good friend. A long, white, fingerlike tentacle, about twenty feet long, came into the room and reached out for Russell. He knew that he had to take hold of it, no matter what it would do to him, and when he was about to do so, he woke up with chills on his neck and back, which recurred in constant, repeating thrills as he recalled that white tentacle. Then he got up and walked around, knowing what the dream meant, that something had come into his life and he had had to take action; the impact of the dream hadn’t been just the fact, though, but the atmosphere, which was that of being in the midst of pure malevolence. The chills came on him even during the day when he thought of being at the thing’s mercy.

  He parked in a turnout on the interstate and faced the car toward the south. It was just dusk, and he found that he wasn’t looking forward to the night in the way he had before, if only because at night so much more was concealed, and he wasn’t in the mood for anything that was concealed. He had a book, too, of names, and he spent a minute or two looking through it, trying to come up with something large and yet without pretension. What was that? He liked the name Roman, but he wasn’t sure. Zofia probably wouldn’t like it, but then she would probably like Peter or Jack. Delilah or Virginia? As he sat there, thinking this over, a car came out of the dusk.

  At this hour, everything appeared in shades of blue, and Russell looked at the tinted snow, the clouds that were fading to night, the tires on the aqua blush of the concrete of the highway, and the air itself, which was permeated with a hue that was the color of a new bruise. The car was a blue Chevrolet, about ten years old, and as it came up from the south, the windshield was filled with that film of reflected sky, at once shiny and impenetrable. The radar showed it was going close to eighty, and when it came by, Russell could see the interior: two men, both with gray hair and pale skin, as though they never saw the sun and lived on potato chips and Twinkies, candy bars and Coke. And yet the color of their skin wasn’t only unhealthy, but a fish-belly or snake-belly white, from which people naturally recoil. The car went by in a rush and then continued north, trailing away and leaving behind that whine of tires and the momentarily troubled air.

  Russell pulled the cruiser into gear, and looked south to see if anyone was coming. Then, as the car disappeared altogether into the increasing gloom of the afternoon, he hesitated. He sat back and waited. Now the silence seeped into the front seat, just the way it had at home. He looked down at the book of names, and then back at the sky, which was fading in earnest, the clouds becoming walls and the distance beyond them becoming opaque. His hands were damp, and he wiped them on his trousers.

  The next one was a Toyota, a faded green that was hard to see in the dusky light. Older, a little rusted. A woman was driving and there was a man in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead. It was as though the passenger were made out of some hard yet frangible substance, like plaster of Paris, and he was so rigid that he could be leaned up against a wall like an ironing board. The woman was going seventy-five miles an hour and she didn’t signal when she went around another car, trying to get into the slow lane. One brake light was burned out. Still, as Russell sat there, his hand on the book of names, he hesitated: perhaps it would be better to wait for a jackass from Connecticut in an SUV who was going ninety miles an hour. He swallowed and then pulled out, smoking it up to catch the car with the burned-out brake light.

  The dispatcher told him the car was registered to a man who lived in Irasburg, near the border. Kent Wilson. He had a couple of arrests for burglary, possession of stolen property, and assault. Russell came up behind them and turned on the lights. They pulled over. The man looked straight ahead, not one way or the other. The woman glanced in the rearview mirror, her eyes lingering there with more than the usual anxiety.

  Russell stepped into the bluish air, which moved in sudden pulses as the cars went by. In the cold and the stink of exhaust, in that fading light, Russell thought, Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe I should have waited longer.

  “Hi,” he said, when he came up to the car. “Do you know why I stopped you?”

  “No,” said the woman. She had brown hair, cut short, and she was wearing a sweater and a pair of blue jeans. Russell glanced in at the man in the car, who wasn’t rigid so much as trembling with effort. Hands on his knees. Looking straight ahead. Russell swallowed. He tried to think of something he could depend upon, and what came to mind was how to manage trouble, or how to talk to people, which was to be friendly, always leaving them the sense that they had a way out, and then, if you found something out, to go after them again later. The idea was to keep the tension expanding and contracting. He looked up at the sky, the layers of clouds with the transparent blue between them, like black paper spread on a tropical sea.

  “You were speeding, and you didn’t signal back there. The taillight is out,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I was just passing that guy back there.”

  “No big deal,” said Russell. “I just want to get you on your way here.”

  “I told you to fix that light,” the woman said to the man.

  “I didn’t know anything about it,” the man said.

  “I told you,” she said.

  “It’s no big deal,” said Russell.

  He took her license and the registration and went back to the cruiser. The dispatcher started checking on the woman, whose name turned out to be Becky Allen. Five feet five inches, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, brown eyes and brown hair. She lived in St. Johnsbury. As he held the license and looked out the window of the cruiser, he couldn’t tell if there was any reason to be afraid or not, and so he just watched as the car he had stopped was absorbed into the evening light. The snow faded from a cold-lip blue to a barely luminous gray, the shadows disappearing there as though they had never existed. The chills from the nightmare came back, too.

  He got out of the cruiser as the cars passed, the sound of the engines and tires on the concrete tailing away, and he was left with a peculiar sense of being abandoned. Mostly he just wanted to do his work without having to think about other cars, but tonight he wished there had been more traffic. Up here it came in discrete collections of cars and trucks with long moments between them.

  He walked back up to the window and said to the man in the passenger seat, “Are you the owner of this car?”

  The man swallowed. He still looked forward, not wanting to swing his eyes toward Russell.

  “Do you have any identification?” Russell said.

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t driving, so I left my license at
home.” The man hesitated. “It’s mine.”

  “So you’re Kent Wilson?” said Russell.

  The man nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “O.K.,” said Russell. He tried to watch the stiffness, or to see what was causing it. “No big deal. I want to get you on your way.”

  He looked into the backseat, but the only things there were a take-out bag that hamburgers had come in, and a woman’s jacket. He didn’t see anything else out there in the open, like a syringe or a plastic bag. Nothing that he could put his finger on.

  “Would you mind stepping back to my car,” said Russell to Becky Allen, “so I can write the ticket and then get you on your way?”

  The man in the front of the car looked straight ahead, although for one instant he glanced at her. Then he went back to staring.

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s all right.”

  She got out of the car. Russell said, “You aren’t armed, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”

  They walked back to his car and she got in on the passenger’s side and he got in behind the wheel. She looked a little tired, but it only added to her tension, as though she had to do something and yet as she tried to do it, she had to use more and more energy, so that when she was only halfway done, she had only a quarter of the energy she needed. She put a hand to her hair and pushed her bangs back, and then turned to him. The difficult thing was that every time he got things going the way they should, he didn’t feel that he was proceeding in the right direction. Instead, he thought that he was just getting in deeper. At least he could say clearly to himself that he didn’t like this sense of being swept along.

  Up ahead, Kent Wilson sat in the car and stared straight ahead.

  “Kent isn’t armed, is he?” said Russell.

  She shook her head, although there was something about her movement that said this wasn’t an unreasonable question to ask.

  “No,” she said.

  “You’re sure?” said Russell.

  “Yeah,” she said. “As far as I know.”

  “Where were you coming from?” said Russell.

  “Oh,” she said. “We just went down to Springfield, Mass., you know.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “We went to look for a sofa,” she said. “There’s a big discount place down there?”

  “What’s it called?” he said.

  “Cost Busters,” she said.

  “Find anything?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “Everyone likes a bargain, I guess. Do me a favor, will you? Just wait here while I talk to your friend. O.K.?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Russell got out of the car and went up to Kent Wilson’s. It was getting cold, but he didn’t want to get into the car with him. Instead he went around to the passenger’s side and said through the window, which was rolled down a little, “I’m almost done here. Just going to write this up. Can you tell me where you are coming from?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I mean,” Russell said. “Just now. Didn’t you go down to Massachusetts?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “We went down there.”

  “Where did you go?” said Russell.

  “A tire store,” said the guy.

  “I guess you’ve got to have tires,” said Russell.

  The man then looked back up the road, his eyes almost lazy, as though when he was scared, his heart slowed down. The car faded into the night, and Russell noticed that the lights of cars, on the other side of the highway, were on now. Reassuring, but distant.

  Then he started walking back toward the cruiser in the keening sound of a truck. Perhaps he should just write the ticket and let it go, but instead he got back into the cruiser and said, “How long have you been using heroin?”

  “What?” said Becky Allen.

  “Look,” said Russell. “I’d like to help.”

  The girl looked straight ahead.

  “Did he say anything?” she said. She made an angry gesture with her head toward the car where Kent Wilson sat. The perfume she had on, the faintly sweaty odor of the T-shirt she was wearing, a nutty fragrance from her hair, and the sad, total lack of movement of her eyes—all that made her seem like desperation itself. Russell wondered if she was infecting him with it, so that the two of them were in a companionship of fear.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  They sat there for a while.

  “I just don’t know,” she said.

  Russell started sweating. When he looked on the other side of the road, where the lights were so golden, he was reminded of those long, perfectly straight rays of light on that wood road. Without thinking, he said, “I don’t know.”

  “What?” she said. She looked at him. He was staring straight ahead, watching the first stars up ahead as they appeared in the northern sky. “Are you O.K.?”

  He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and nodded. In the desperation of her glance, Russell felt a sudden, piercing empathy.

  “You don’t look it,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” he said. He put the handkerchief away. “Well, how long?”

  “A while,” she said.

  “Are you carrying anything now?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

  Russell tried to see how the other car was sitting on its springs: was it canted over more than it should be, or was that just the way it sat on the side of the road?

  “Is it O.K. if I look in the car?” said Russell.

  “Sure,” she said. “Go on.”

  He picked up the microphone and asked for someone else from the barracks to come out to be there when he did this, since he didn’t want to be alone with his head in the car while the woman and the man stood around. The dispatcher said Huntington, number 239, was on the other side of the highway, close by. He’d be there soon.

  Becky Allen sat without moving in the lights from the dashboard. As it got darker, the lights gave her skin a greenish cast, and from time to time she glanced at him, her eyes filled with a color like artificial lime. There was something about the vital promise of her, even here, no matter how desperate she was, that made this moment even worse. Russell talked about the weather, the length of the winter, and she just nodded, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huntington arrived, pulling up behind Russell’s cruiser like a shark gliding out of the depths.

  “I never thought it would turn out this way,” she said.

  “I know,” said Russell.

  “What do you know?” she said.

  Russell shrugged. He got out of the car and saw that Huntington had gotten out of his car, too. Russell had the sense of the cars, of the people in them, of himself standing there as a kind of animation, as in a computer game. Then he shook his head and said to Huntington, “I’ll be right back.”

  Russell went up to the other car and told Kent that he was going to take a look in it. Then Russell leaned behind the driver’s seat and smelled the stink of the old hamburgers. He put his hand along the rear of the seat, careful about it in case a needle was in there. But, even so, his hands were sweating and he tried to be alert: wasn’t that the solution? Then he moved the floor mat aside and saw a small gold ring. The man in the front seat turned back and looked at Russell, then glanced down. When Russell glanced up, they were looking into each other’s eyes.

  “You know,” said Kent Wilson, “this isn’t good. I mean somehow or other this is going wrong. Right from the beginning.”

  “Like how?” said Russell.

  “Oh,” he said, “like getting stopped. You’d think she’d drive better than that, you know what I mean?”

  The man pushed his hair back with both hands.

  “I’d like to work this off,” the man said. “You know? I’d like to
give you something. I’d like to get credit for something. You see what I mean?”

  “Sure,” said Russell. “Like what?”

  “She’s carrying it,” said Kent.

  “Where?” said Russell.

  “Just ask her,” said the man.

  Outside, the highway glowed with the last light. Russell turned back toward his car, but as he did so, he tried to take a deep breath, and to think. The man had given up Becky too easily.

  He got into his car and sat behind the wheel.

  “I’m going to have to search you,” said Russell to Becky. “Or you could just give it to me.”

  “He said something,” she said. She gestured. “Didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Russell.

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “Yes, you do. That son of a bitch. And to think ...”

  It was totally dark now, and her face was more tired than ever in the green light. She rocked back and forth.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “Look,” said Russell. “I’m going to have to get a search warrant. And then we’re going to have to go to the hospital. That way you can have an internal examination.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s the safest thing,” said Russell. “That’s where you’re carrying it, isn’t it?”

  She sat there without moving, her eyes set on the distance. Every now and then a car went by, its taillights describing long, curving arcs, like tracer rounds.

  “I’ve never been so alone,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I’m not going to cry,” she said. “What good does it do anyway?”

  “It might help,” said Russell.

  But he knew that it wouldn’t help, and he guessed that as far as she was concerned, everything around her was chaotic; at least he understood what that was like. In a way that he found hard to describe, the sense of both of them confronting a similar difficulty, although from different ends of the world, was reassuring. It was the sense that something in his heart was connected to something in hers. Usually he was repelled by people who were carrying drugs, but in the moment he had the impulse to show a small, perfect tenderness to her. He wasn’t certain how this came out of the lingering sense of terror, but it did, in an upside-down, inside-out kind of way.