NIGHT CRUISING (13 page)

Tonight, late tonight,
in Mexico, he would find someone with money. He had decided against
an out-and-out murder in front of Molly. She wasn't ready for that
just yet. But he did have a plan that involved her. She would
misinterpret the scene just as he wanted her to. She'd be even more
in his debt after tonight.

He turned on the shower
and stepped in before the temperature was adjusted. He liked the cold
shock of water anyway. Then he let it run hot, so hot his skin pinked
and he was breathing steam as he lathered his body and washed it
down.

By the time he was
dried, the patch on his scalp newly shaven and Velcroed, freshly
dressed, all his things put away, he had been in the white-tiled
shower room for over an hour. He stared once more into his own eyes
searching for something he had never yet found--that remorse they
said he should feel.
They
, of course, were fools and sons of
fools and sons of bitches too. But that did not keep him from
looking, when there was a mirror and privacy available, for the
pitying heart the word told him he walked without. In a curious way
he thought perhaps
they
, those experts on man's troubles, were
wrong. He
knew
he had a heart, though full of pity, he
sincerely doubted. It didn't occur often, not enough obviously to
convince him, but sometimes when he looked down into those luminous
green depths of soul he thought he saw a tiny man staring back at
him, a miniature Cruise, if you will, older, stooped,
changed
,
but Cruise all the same. He was locked behind the wide orbs, and that
small man waved at him to signal the start of something, a beginning
of warmth, of compassion, of humanity.

Today the reflection
was not there. The eyes went on unblinkingly staring back from
heartless, remorseless, unfeeling voids. This meant he was all right.
He was sane and safe from guilt, that bag of snakes he had discarded
so many years in the past. There was no little man in there smiling
like the Devil himself, smug bastard, waving him to enter the dark
passageway that led to the place where he must shoulder
responsibility.

Good.
Most
excellent, dude, as the kids said. He didn't need to encounter
anything inside himself that so far he'd been able to live without.

He found Molly hanging
over a video game watching a grown man trying to beat a rigged
machine. "Boo," Cruise said softly, coming close behind
her. She smelled of Ivory soap and baby powder. Maybe the baby powder
was her underarm deodorant. It was faint but lovely. He inhaled as
she flinched and turned to him.

"Oh, hi!"

"Been waiting
long? Ready to shake this place?"

"No, uh, yeah."

Cruise smiled and,
taking her arm, led her from the Metro Truck Stop into the settling
gloom of another clear starry night meant for the road.

#

Over the border into
Mexico Cruise moved away in his mind from the raucous hilarity that
was Juarez. He knew Molly was excited by the strange tongue spoken by
the people in Juarez, by the filled dilapidated buses hobbling
through the potholed streets, by the many lights, and the hordes of
people tumbling into storefronts and clubs. He had been here too many
times to find a scintilla of excitement about the Mexicans anymore.
He thought of them as a subspecies if he thought of them at all. The
bright ones headed across the border despite the risks, and it was
the poor and stupid ones left behind to scratch a living from the
tourists. He despised Juarez as he despised all the border towns.
They were traps for Americans, full of laughing brown liars and
cheaters who spent all their waking hours trying to part a man from
his money in one way or another, while not so secretly envying him
his freedom, country, and income.

Cruise spent as little
time as he could getting through Juarez and onto the road outside
town that led back east along the border. When he failed to answer
some of Molly's questions, she stopped asking. He didn't want to
talk. He wasn't a goddamn tourist guide. He just wanted to get out of
Juarez without mishap and find the town that welcomed him.

There, in that nameless
place unrecorded on any maps, the hotel and bars and whorehouses were
run by Adolpho Ramirez, the mightiest drug lord in all of northern
Mexico. The people who lived in that town were owned and in the
employ of Ramirez. Locals didn't frequent his place. Federales did
not dare invade it. Americans, except those who came to buy the
illegal goods in large quantities, were not permitted. Cruise had
been rudely routed away when first he wandered close to Ramirez,s
territory. But the second time he came, he brought a young boy as an
offering, a shy, gangly kid from Oklahoma who hadn't turned out to be
a good witness. The boy's brain was sizzled from drug abuse, at age
fourteen, and Cruise hadn't any use for him.

But Ramirez admired
young, pale-skinned American males, and once accepting the gift, he
praised Cruise for his taste and generosity. From then on Cruise was
given free run of the town, a trusted visitor. Ramirez even used him,
when he came into town, as an assassin to dispatch men known to have
filched money or a personal stash of drugs. He didn't like to use his
own men as assassins for he claimed it stirred a blood lust that
might one day be turned his direction. As long as Cruise handled the
thieves, that danger was averted.

Cruise was given free
rooms at the hotel for as long as he wished, food, women, and any
money the thief was carrying at the moment of his death. Sometimes
that amounted to quite a lot for Ramirez's men were not the
poverty-stricken peons that inhabited other Mexican towns. Most of
them carried enough dinero on their persons to feed a normal family
for a year. They were the richest men in all of the northern
districts--maybe all of Mexico. It was just that some of them were
greedier than others, and these were the ones Cruise murdered without
compunction.

"Where are we
going?"

Cruise blinked,
startled from reverie. Lost in his thoughts, he'd forgotten about
Molly and her gee-whiz chatter. "A town I know. It's better than
Juarez."

"Is it far?"
Molly peered out the open window at the dark desert reaches that
bounded the rutted highway.

"Another thirty
miles or so. Not far."

She must have picked up
on his mood. She sat quietly without asking more questions while the
night wind blew through the car and the headlights pierced the
ultimate darkness ahead. Vehicles did not travel this road from
Juarez. It was too dangerous to enter Ramirez's territory without a
standing invitation. Molly wouldn't have seen them, but Cruise knew
they had passed a patrol point a couple of miles back. Just at a turn
in the road there was a bank of land hiding men with binoculars. They
scanned passing traffic. Armed with rifles fitted with night-scopes,
had they not recognized Cruise's looks-the long hair, beard, and
mustache--and his signal--a blink of his headlights to dim and then
back to high--he wouldn't have been allowed passage.

This lonely dark
stretch of highway reminded Cruise of Arkansas country roads in his
youth. No streetlights or houses, just vast black walls bounding
either side of the roadway. You might be lost on the dark side of the
moon and never find your way home again. He didn't drive those roads,
though, when he was a boy. By the time he owned a car, they had been
paved, and there were houses and mobile homes to relieve the monotony
of night. When he was small he plodded down those roads alone, the
chill air buffeting him. There were all sorts of monsters that lurked
beyond the safe roadbed, and he imagined they snarled and fought to
get to him.

His father made him
walk six miles, at night, always at night when it was most
frightening for young minds, to his aunt's house on errands. Cruise,
after a time, realized these enforced marches were meant for other
than to fetch a cup of sugar for his mother or a screwdriver for his
father. They were punishments of the sort only his father could
devise. Sometimes he let Cruise's sister, Lannie, walk with him. But
more often than not he was forced to go alone and battle the fear
without help.

When Lannie accompanied
him, Cruise used her for a sounding board in order to puzzle out the
reasons his family behaved as they did. "We don't really need
vanilla extract tonight, do we?" he'd ask, trying to find out if
Lannie understood what was happening. "I mean, Mama's not baking
a cake or anything. She's not even cooking tonight."

"We have to get
the vanilla," Lannie said. "Daddy said so."

"Well, I know we
have to get it, but we don't need it, do we?"

"We do if we don't
want a whipping."

"So we have to
walk twelve miles round-trip in the dark, in the cold, just so we
won't be whipped." He couldn't make it any more crystal-clear to
her than that.

"Shut up and let's
just walk faster."

"Lannie, do you
love them?"

"Who?"

She sounded like an
owl.
Whooo. Whooo
. "You know who."

"I don't care,"
she said. She strode ahead of him and he had to rush to catch up
before she was lost in the dark.

"But do you love
them?" he persisted.

"They're nuts."

"I know that,
but..."

"Shut up and walk
faster. I have homework to finish when we get back."

"Lannie, why does
he hate us so much?"

"I don't know."

"Why don't we run
away?"

She stopped in the
roadbed and grabbed him by the arms to shake him. She was taller than
he, though he was a year older. In another two years he would
experience a growth spurt and be as tall as his father. "Don't
say that again! He'd kill you if you ran away. Don't even say it."
She let him go and he could hear her sniffling back tears.

"Besides, where
would we go? We don't have nowhere to go."

Well, that was true if
nothing else. His aunt, whose house they were sent to on errands, was
much older than his father, so old she smelled like the handkerchiefs
pressed for years between the pages of a Bible. She lived alone, an
old widow, and she wasn't quite right in the head, either. She
thought Lannie was Mama and he was Daddy; she never got their names
right. Senile, his mother told him once, but he didn't know what that
was. To him she was just wrong-headed and lost and lonely. It always
took her the longest time to find whatever it was they had come to
borrow. "A flashlight? I think there's one beneath the bed. No?
Then let's look in the attic. No? My land, it must be in the kitchen,
look under the sink, it's probably there."

He hadn't any other
relatives that he knew about--none he could run to. They didn't have
friends, not his family, and they didn't go to church or social
functions so he knew no one to help or advise him. If he told the
teachers at school that his father beat them mercilessly over the
smallest infraction, they would have taken him away, but he had heard
where children went who were torn from the bosom of their families.
They went to institutions and they were made orphans. Terrible,
terrible words. What choice was that, and how could he run from one
hellhole to another if he had any sense?

The night breeze
rustled the leaves of the trees that pressed up to the ditches lining
the roadbed. He heard a whispering sound, like many voices repeating
a phrase. Cruise shivered, thinking the leaves were voices of demons
lying in wait for two children hurrying and stumbling through the
darkness. He knew what they must look like, those demons, with their
monster teeth and claws and tails that whipped behind them like
snakes. He had never glimpsed them as much as he stared into the dark
to see the evidence of his fear, but he knew they were scary, they
were truly the stuff of nightmares. Despite the fact his family were
not churchgoers, he had read parts of the Bible. He knew about these
things.

"Lannie? What are
you going to be when you grow up?"

If she'd only talk to
him, he wouldn't have to think about the monsters in the trees.

She rushed ahead again
and he had to run to catch her.

"Lannie?"

"I'm going to be a
country singer," she said. "Like Tammy Wynette. I'm gonna
have a big house in Memphis and drive a fancy convertible car."

"But you can't
sing."

"Yes, I can. You
just never heard me, that's all. I sing by myself."

"Sing for me,
Lannie. Go ahead, I'd like to hear you sing, please?"

She sang then, and her
voice stopped Cruise in his tracks. She halted, feeling with her
hands in the dark for him. She held onto his arms and he couldn't
even see her face, but he heard her soft, melodic voice, and it
filled him with a longing he could not name. It was a church hymn,
"Amazing Grace," and it was sung by an angel on her knees
before the throne of God. It made him ache. It made him cry.

"...how sweet
the sound, that saved a wretch like me..."

It made him lift his
hands and grip her elbows to keep her from ascending to heaven.
Oh,
Lannie,
he thought, hoping her voice would never stop.
Oh,
Lannie you do sing, you do!

When she finished and
let him go, she turned and hurried away. When he could get hold of
his emotions, he ran as fast as he could. He reached for the back of
her shirt to stop her. "That was..." He was out of breath.
"That was...was...great."

"Stupid," she
said.

"No, it was
wonderful. You can be Tammy Wynette when you grow up, I know you
can."

"I can be nothing.
I am nothing. And if you tell that I sang a song, I'll kill you. I'll
tell
Daddy
to kill you, then I'll help him bury you in a deep
grave where the worms will eat off your face. Now c'mon. We're almost
there. I've got homework to do when we get home."