NIGHT CRUISING (20 page)

Arizona didn't get more
than two inches of precipitation a year normally. Cruise didn't know
how the trees in the national forests were able to grow. If it rained
tonight he didn't expect much. A sprinkle. A light shower.

He was wrong. He came
into town just ahead of a gully-washer. Lightning strobed the heavens
delineating Globe's tall mounds of coppery dust against an
electric-blue back-drop. Thunder pealed over the forested
mountainsides and rolled down like boulders into the empty two A.M.
city streets. Firs shivered crazily in the wind. Bits of paper and
litter were flung into the air, plate-glass windows shimmered from
the wind's force, a child's red and green ball rolled from a lawn
across the street ahead of them.

He heard Molly
wondering aloud where they were. He refused to answer. He wanted to
ask why she didn't read the sign at the city limits, but fuck it, let
her stew. Let her be scared. Scared enough to piss her pants. He had
become distanced from her on the drive from Safford to Globe. She was
no more to him at the moment than a rag doll with a voice, a dog with
a bark, an animal with a whine. Given the least provocation he could
pull over and do her without a minute's regret. That's exactly the
place he had come to.

He found his turn for
Highway 88 north just as the rain let loose. At first it was rain.
Big splattering drops that split open on his windshield like fat
grapes. Five minutes after he had the windshield wipers going the
rain turned to hailstones. The pummeling sounds on the roof, hood and
trunk of the car sounded like a truckload of hard-boiled eggs being
dumped over them. Cruise got his window up in time, but Molly was
making little squeaky noises as she brushed off the hail while trying
to get her window cranked shut.

That was when the wind
picked up. The trees covering the slopes of the mountains began to
dance insanely in the headlights. The hail was slanted straight at
them, missiles in the cones of the car lights, striking the
windshield with enough force to make Cruise wince and hunch his
shoulders over the wheel. There were no other cars on 88. They might
as well have been alone on an alien planet where the weather had
turned mean and meant to beat the shit out of any machine that dared
move about in it.

Cruise slowed, drove
snail-like on the narrow two-lane until he reached the Theodore
Roosevelt Lake. It gleamed black as an oil slick to his right. The
wind had kicked up frothy white crusts of waves that beat on the
shoreline. Hail pockmarked the water.

"I'm pulling
over," he said.

"What is this?
What's happening? Is it a tornado?"

He heard Molly, but he
didn't want to talk to her. He thought perhaps it was a tornado, but
he couldn't understand it. The tornadoes he'd been acquainted with in
his cross-country travels were experienced from inside motel rooms or
restaurants. He heard reports on the radio of that kind of bad
weather looming, he always got off the road. He knew a tornado wind
could pick up a car and send it flying through the side of a building
or dump it down in a cornfield smashed flat as a dime. If this was a
tornado, he'd be goddamned if he was going to drive through it.
They'd have to wait it out.

Molly had her seat belt
off. She was turned to her window, hands flat against the glass. With
the motor stopped, the headlights off, the world outside took on a
nightmarish quality. They could hear the wind shrieking in a
multitude of infernal voices, low, high, harsh, whispery. The lake
waters slapped angrily against the shore. The hail had stopped, but
now rain again poured down hard and fast, sheeting the windows with
gray. Lightning still sparkled and snapped to light up the scene.
Once, in the light of lightening strikes, he saw the lake foaming and
boiling like a caldron over a hot fire. Once he saw trees on a
mountainside leaning almost parallel to the ground. The Chrysler
rocked on its tires. It shook them in their seats and had Cruise's
top teeth rattling against his bottom molars.

"Jesus Christ,"
he whispered.

"What're we gonna
do?" Molly repeated over and over.

Cruise didn't know.
They were at the mercy of the storm. If a wind came down and plucked
them from the roadside and hurled them into the lake, they probably
wouldn't know anything until they were sucking water. He leaned
forward and tried to see out the top of the windshield. He wanted to
sight the motherfucking tornado before it got them, but the rain was
falling too hard, he couldn't see anything but streaming water. His
imagination took over. He thought he saw a funnel reaching down out
of the blackness to snatch them from the earth. He thought he heard a
freight train and that's what they always said preceded a tornado
touching down.

The girl was nuts,
trying to open the passenger door. What was her name? Molly! Irish
girl, red hair, that was the one. He was more and more confused as
the wind raged around the car and shook him where he sat.

He knew he couldn't let
the girl out of the car. That was absolutely out of the question. A
big negatory. The wind would take her away from him. The lake would
cover her over and he'd never see her again.

He bounded across the
space between the blue cloth bucket seats and grabbed her shirt with
both hands. Fabric ripped at the seams. He held on as she opened the
door now and wind and rain sliced into the car wetting his hands, his
forearms. He grappled with her and had her around the neck, hauling
her back inside. The door slammed shut from the force of the wind.
The bang of it made the pressure in his eardrums close. He swallowed
hard to clear them. He held her back against his chest, her head in
the crook of his arm. All he had to do was snap it. Easy. Be rid of
the nuisance of her. She'd been trying to escape. It wasn't the storm
she wanted to flee. It was him, of course he knew that.

He heard her weeping.
"Do that again and I break your fucking neck." When she
didn't say anything he said, "I should do it anyway. Save myself
trouble later on."

She gasped as his arm
tightened down. "No!"

He let up a little, but
not much.

"I won't do it
again!"

"I know you
won't." He pushed her away and reached behind him to the back
floorboard. He felt the loops of rope he'd brought along. He found
one end of the rope, brought her hands together, and began tying her
securely. He passed the rope through the hole in the door armrest.
She wanted to get out again, she'd have to take the goddamned door
with her. The whole goddamned car.

While he was busy with
Molly the wind dropped and the rain fell to a soft shower. The sound
of the freight train was gone and in its place was an eerie stillness
with the gentle patter of raindrops as punctuation on the roof.

"It passed,"
he said, breathing heavy, fear in his voice.

His arms were still
damp from the rain. Molly sat quietly subdued, roped into submission.
The windows had fogged from their breathing.

A rap came at Cruise's
side window. He jerked away and stared out. Molly let out a yelp of
surprise.

The rap came again and
someone had hold of the door handle trying to open the door.

"What the fuck?"
Cruise rolled down the window while holding the door closed by
grasping the armrest.

A face swam forward out
of the dark. It was wet, the hair plastered in bangs across the broad
forehead. It was a frantic red bloated face with a double chin
beneath it belonging to a man who needed to lose at least a hundred
pounds. His eyes were dark circles, his nose small and pointed. His
lips worked long before anything came from them. He was like an actor
in a foreign movie, his words dubbed in and not synchronized with his
lip movements.

"My car!" he
screamed. Rain sluiced down his cheeks like tear tracks. "My car
turned over! I stopped! But the wind turned us over. My wife...my
wife's caught...can't get out..."

Cruise pushed open the
door and crawled from the bucket seat. He stood several inches taller
than the fat man. "Where?" he asked, feeling the first
droplets of rain soaking into the back of his shirt.

"Down here. I saw
your car lights, saw you pull over just before that wind hit. Please
help me--we have to get her out."

Cruise followed behind
the waddling fellow. He looked like a duck in his proper element.
Cruise noted he wore a sloppy suit in a dark color. It was soaking
wet. The cuffs of his pants dragged the ground and his heels stepped
on them. When he turned back once to gesture, Cruise saw he wore a
diamond ring on his right hand.

The car was just around
a bend in the road, hidden from view by the forested mountain. It was
on its side in a steep ditch, the undercarriage facing the highway.

"I don't know how
to get into it," the man was saying. Screaming. The wind had
stopped, the rain was gentle, the clouds were parting and letting
through the moon, but this man was out of his head and he couldn't
stop screaming.

"She's on the
other side!" He went around the front-end of the car and pointed
at the ground.

"Let's try to push
it back on its wheels," Cruise suggested.

He and the fat man put
their shoulders to the roof of the car. It was a white Ford Escort.
New. Light.

The car moved, tilted,
fell with a resounding crunch into the gravel lining the roadbed. The
windows on the side they faced were broken into spiderwebs. The fat
man rushed to the wedged door and tried to open it. He couldn't. He
was screaming still when Cruise went to the driver's side door and
opened it. He leaned in. A small woman, dark hair thin as spaghetti
swirling around her face, lay with her torso on the seat, her legs
and hips crumpled into the floorboard area. She looked dead to him
and he'd seen a lot of dead people. She wasn't moving or making any
sound. He thought her eyes were open. Her mouth was. Her bottom
denture lay on her unmoving chest.

Cruise felt the man
behind him, trying to pull him out of the way. Cruise backed off.
Stood watching while the man crawled into the car on his hands and
knees. His tremendous belly got stuck between the steering wheel and
the seat back. He was still screaming and crying and Cruise knew then
the woman was lifeless.

Cruise felt beneath his
hair for the knife. He pulled it gently from the Velcro patch. He
stood with it in his hand until the fat man extricated himself from
the wrecked car. What did this man have to live for now? When the
grieving husband turned to face him, that's when Cruise took a few
steps to circle him, got behind his wide back before he could move
again, grabbed the wet hair of his head, jerked him backward until
the throat was exposed.

The screaming turned to
a coughing, a gurgling. The little hook on the end of the sharp blade
had severed the carotid artery and a few fatty neck muscles. The man
jerked in Cruise's big arms. His blood warmed Cruise's skin where
he'd caught him around the chest to hold him up. He held him until
life drained out and the man was dead weight. He dropped him
unceremoniously to the pavement. Stooping, he reached inside the coat
pocket and slipped out the wallet. Took the cash. Wrenched the ring
from the man's thick finger. Kicked him out of the way. Inside the
car Cruise searched the front seat for the woman's purse and couldn't
find it. Finally he gave up and shut the car door.

He'd have to wash
himself in the lake. He thought maybe he'd do it right at the edge of
the shore near the Chrysler so that Molly could see him naked.

He'd have to hurry.
Another car might come along anytime. Cruise thought that would be a
definite inconvenience. He also thought he felt much better with the
fat man dead. The ice that earlier encased his brain had warmed and
melted, leaving him able to think.

Molly was safe for a
little while longer.

#

Molly's wrists were
rubbed raw where the thin yellow nylon rope circled them. She tried
like hell to get herself loose when Cruise left the car to help the
fat man. Had she been successful, she could have disappeared into the
dark, wet woods where Cruise would never have found her.

She tried everything
she could think to do. She twisted her arms until her elbows groaned,
trying to get her fingers on the knots in the rope. She jerked and
hauled, yelling out each time when the rope burned into the flesh of
her wrists. She even scooted from the seat and knelt on the
floorboard to face the armrest trying to get a hold on the knots, but
nothing she did worked. She merely succeeded in tearing up the skin
on her wrists and crying until she felt sick to her stomach.

She was just able to
get back into the seat before Cruise reappeared by her window. He
scared her, standing there in the dark, the moon over his shoulder.
She didn't know what he was doing, what he wanted. She reached up
tentatively and wiped the fogged window. She was afraid suddenly that
he wanted to rape her and was screwing up his courage to do so. But
after a short time he stepped away from the window, walked toward the
lake while shedding his clothes in the moonlight. Rain still came
down, but it was nothing like the storm earlier. This was a light
drizzle that sent trails of water slipping quietly down the
windshield.

Molly watched,
hypnotized by Cruise's actions. He stripped right to the skin. She
saw his white buttocks, his wide muscled shoulders. She saw him walk
right into the water until it was up to his knees. He turned then and
began dipping the water over himself with his hands. Splashing
himself. It had to be cold. What was he doing? He was too distant for
her to see his face. He looked like a nature god of the wilderness
with his long hair dripping onto his broad shoulders, swinging free
around his face as he bent to dip the water. What sort of bizarre
ritual this was she could not possibly imagine. He had been wet from
the rain, so why was he bathing in the lake?