NIGHT CRUISING (26 page)

Saw Cruise take her by
the hair and cut her throat with one swipe of the knife in his fist.

Saw the blood gush out
and river down the green uniform with the white pockets, staining it
all one shade of bright red.

Saw the woman's eyes
again. The fear stuck there, imprinted there forever.

Saw the woman slump to
the floor at Cruise's feet as if she were a toy animal who had lost
its stuffing.

Molly stood over her,
head hanging, tears falling onto the inert body until Cruise took her
around the counter and out the door and placed her gently into the
Chrysler.

As they pulled away
from the store, Molly saw the cowboy in the headlight glare. He lay
on his back, the tips of his boots pointing in opposite directions.

Molly couldn't see his
neck, but she knew it was cut. She couldn't see the blood, but she
knew it pooled beneath his head.

She couldn't bear to
look at Cruise driving the car onto the freeway ramp, but she knew he
was there.

She didn't think she'd
ever get away from him.

#

Cruise crossed the
state line into California. He drove fifty-eight miles to where 86
south crossed the freeway. He took the exit ramp.

"Mexicali,"
he whispered.

Before he reached the
border crossing he had to bathe. There was blood all over the front
of his clothes, some of it his.

He saw a side road
leading to a subdivision of "ranchettes." The archway sign
hanging over the gravel entrance way said "Hondo Estates."
Cruise thought if these people really believed they could ranch on
one acre, they'd buy anything. Although the per capita income for
California was one of the highest in the nation, following only
Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, the people living along the
border barely scraped a living from the arid soil. They could call
California the Golden State all they wanted. They could give the
state motto as Eureka, meaning "I have found it.'' But those
living in the Hondo Estates knew a different California. One of
rattlesnakes and lizards, cacti and blue burning seasons that
scorched the brain and cracked the earth into a jigsaw

effect.

There was another side
road to the right before he ever reached the first boxy ranch house
sitting woebegone in the distance. He turned down the road. The
Chrysler bounced through the potholes, spewing gravel behind the
tires. The shocks and springs squeaked in protest. The headlights
bobbed up and down, highlighting a landscape that looked
bomb-blasted. It was a desert without a rose, sand without a sea, low
scrubby vegetation that clung to the earth without the encouragement
of rainfall.

"Where are we
going?"

Cruise heard the barely
controlled desperation in Molly's voice. She thought he was taking
her out into the desert to die. He could let her think that. Or he
could still her worry. Because she had been so much trouble back in
Yuma--it was
her
fault he was covered with alien blood--he
decided to let her fret.

When he thought they
were far enough off the main road, he stopped the car, turned off the
headlights. The night was quiet the way it is out in the wilderness
before dawn. The last time he had stopped this way the tornado wind
and rain and thunder was deafening.

The silence was a
welcome respite. Cruise felt he had been driving for eons. The inside
of his head jingled and jangled from the aftermath of the Yuma
killings. A muscle in his jaw twitched spasmodically. He put his hand
there to hold it motionless, but when he took his hand away it jumped
again, playing to its own symphony.

Molly had not said
anything more. Bitch tried, he'd kick her out of the car, then kick
her some more until she couldn't speak again.

He opened the car door.
The overhead dome light came on and made him twitch. He stood outside
the closed door looking over the roof into the far reaches of empty
desert. He could see an occasional car passing on the highway. It was
the early part of the morning, the late part of the night. Not many
drivers going to and from Mexicali, Mexico.

He looked at the sky.
Not a cloud. The stars so bright, so shining, they looked near enough
to gather and pocket.

The moon riding low, a
silver-white nimbus radiating a cold hazy aloofness that caused
shivers to break out on Cruise's wounded arms.

He stepped away from
the car and found the key that would open the trunk. He stood with
his hands resting on the upraised trunk lid wondering what he had
wanted.
Oh, yes,
the bottled water
. He was sticky damp
with blood and he must get clean or he would go mad. He could smell
himself. He gagged, swallowed hard, reached in for two gallons of the
purified water. He set them on the ground near his feet, lay the car
keys on the fender.

He leaned down and
opened one of the plastic jugs. He stood again, lofting the jug over
his head, feeling the chill thrill of water cascading down over his
closed eyes. He stopped, lowered the jug. He had to get out of the
clothes. He had to bury them once the water had cleansed him of the
scent of old caked blood. He disrobed, slipping out of his shoes and
socks, kicking the slacks from him, throwing the shirt from his back.
He stood in his jockey shorts beneath the star-studded heaven. He saw
the wet, clinging gauze bandages on both arms. He ripped at them
until they were on the ground. Again he took up the water jug and
poured it over him. When it was empty, he took the second jug, and
used it to wash his chest, his belly, the wounds on his arms. The
flesh there split open and clouded the water as it rolled down his
elbows.

The first time he had
murdered someone,
two
someones, he had to throw himself in the
creek to make the blood disappear. It was the first and last time he
had killed people he knew. He waited until he was sixteen. He had
suppressed the urge for seven years. He had waited patiently since he
was nine-almost-ten years old, since the day Orson and Edward tried
to run over him with the lawn mower in the backyard.

He toyed with the idea
of murder the way a cat toys with a mouse. He dreamed of it. Planned
and plotted. Giggled over his secret at inappropriate times.

Since his brothers were
older than he, his murderous thoughts were not carried out until he
was sixteen and had come into his growth. The muscles of his arms and
legs thickened and grew strong; he had reached most of his adult
height of six feet four inches. He was just as much a man as either
of his brothers. He knew he could take them.

His method was the
knife, even then. He could have sneaked his father's shotgun from the
bedroom closet. Or he could have put rat poison in his brothers'
food. Or he could have burned them alive. No, dead. Burned them
dead,
dead
. But in all his years of planning the deed he had never
considered any method more just, more intimate, than a knife to the
throat. With a gun you had to stand away from your victims. With
poison you never laid a hand on them. With fire you had to manipulate
too many elements, gasoline and matches. These were all oddly
impersonal ways to take a life when a knife was a handy weapon, when
it afforded him close contact, when it demanded that he really
meant
it. You could accidentally shoot, poison, or torch a person.

There was nothing
accidental about cutting a throat.

He talked Orson and
Edward into a fishing trip. Orson was nineteen, Edward twenty-one.
They were both working at the sawmill, bringing home paychecks and
paying their father room and board. They had girlfriends and cars and
they thought Cruise--
Herod
--had long forgotten the little
trick with the lawn mower. Cruise knew what they thought. That
because they were children at the time it didn't matter, it didn't
count. They thought he'd believe they wouldn't have hurt him anyway,
even if Lannie hadn't intervened. It was a joke. A prank. A scary bit
of nonsense.

Harmless play.

But Cruise knew he had
escaped death by inches, by centimeters, by seconds. He had seen
their faces. Their expressions from that day were forever emblazoned
on his memory.

They meant it. It was
not a childish impulse gone awry. They would have killed him while he
struggled to free himself of the homemade grave.

Cruise had the knife
stolen from his mother's cutlery drawer in the kitchen. It was the
sharpest five-inch blade in the house. The handle was made of a dark
wood dulled by years of use. There were three shiny steel rivets in
the handle that he often covered over one by one with the pad of his
right thumb.

They set out on a
Saturday on another summer day much like the one when Cruise thought
he was about to die. They threw fishing rods and two boxes of tackle
into the rear of Orson's truck, an old l965 black Ford. They drove to
a favorite fishing spot on the river, the truck bounding down a
narrow back lane through the thick Arkansas woods.

Cruise let his brothers
josh him about being "a squirt who grew into a giant." He
let them horse around the way they aways did, popping the tops on
cans of Budweiser, and talking about the pussy they were going to get
off their girls that night at a dance being held in town.
How
sorry
they were Cruise was just a kid yet and didn't know diddly
about fucking girls.
How sad
it was he didn't seem to have the
same kind of luck they did in attracting the opposite sex.

"You
even got
a pecker?" Orson asked, giving Cruise a knock on his arm to send
him off-balance.

"Sure he does,"
Edward chimed in. "He's got a
wood-pecker
."

They thought that was
hilarious. They thought they were stand-up fucking comics.

Cruise let them make
fun of him. He let them bait their fishing lines and throw them into
the gently flowing brown river. He let them lean back with their
Lucky Strikes trailing smoke above their heads. And then he went to
the truck to feel under the seat for the knife he had hidden there
before the fishing trip.

"Where's Herod
going?" Edward asked his brother.

Orson looked over his
shoulder, frowned, turned back to the river. "Fuck if I know.
Take a piss maybe. How should I know what the kid's doing?'

"Hey, Herod, you
jerking off, all this talk of pussy?" Edward laughed like a
jackal.

Cruise pretended not to
hear. The hate now was so great it was like a barbed-wire fence
around his heart. It squeezed and pierced him. He bled inside, the
hate turning his blood black and rich as the dirt they had scooped
around his neck in the backyard when he was a trusting naive boy.

He came from the truck,
keeping the knife out of sight behind his right thigh as he walked
toward them lounging on the riverbank.

A pair of redbirds flew
down and rested on a bush near the water. A slippery bed of pine
needles carpeted the incline to the water's edge, and Cruise had to
walk carefully to keep from falling. A cooling breeze wove through
the treetops, making the leaves and limbs sing in soft chorus. He
drew in a deep breath of the green pines. Shifting spots of sunlight
blinked through the forest and shone like a sheet of hammered bronze
from the river surface.

"You gonna fish or
what?" Orson asked, not bothering to turn to look at Cruise.

"He can't catch
any goddamn fish, Or. He ain't got the co-or-din-ation," Edward
said, laughing at the fun things he knew how to say.

Cruise had Orson by the
neck, arching out his chest in struggle, before Edward knew what was
really happening on the riverbank. Orson dropped his rod and grabbed
for Cruise's strong, choking arm. "Fuck!" he screamed and
that was all. He was holding his throat to halt the flood.

Edward scrambled onto
his knees, moving toward them, hands out, Lucky Strike dropping from
his wet lips, when Cruise finished with Orson and turned to bury the
knife in Edward's stomach.

"Ah..." he
said.

"What...?" he
said.

And Cruise was on him,
knocking him backward to the ground. Redbirds fled with a flashy
rustle of wings while the sunlight played over the tussling figures
on the slick bank as they rolled thunderously toward the dun-colored
water.

Cruise had a time with
Edward. He was older, he wasn't taken by surprise, he wanted very
much to live and catch a fish and go to town for the dance and feel
his girlfriend's breasts beneath her dress.

In the end Cruise half
drowned, half cut his brother to death. Once they rolled down to the
river, he pushed Edward's face under the water while cutting
frenziedly at his exposed Adam's apple. Edward sucked in water and
blood instead of air. He groped blindly, his fingers pressing over
Cruise's face, trying to find a way to stop the killing, the cutting,
the cover of water.

Cruise muttered
insanely, "Die, you bastard, die, you son-of-a-bitching fuck,
die..."

When it was done Cruise
climbed to his feet and looked down at his clothes. The T-shirt he
wore was soaked scarlet. Mud and blood and pine needles covered him
from the cuffs of his jeans to the roots of his hair. He thought
there could be no greater hell than to spend another moment covered
with the evidence of his crimes.

He dived headfirst into
the river. He swam out to the center where the whirlpools formed.
They carried him down-stream. When he climbed onto the bank, he had
to push his way through tangled undergrowth to where his brothers lay
silent and staring upon the muddy, bloody bank.

He buried them quite a
ways from where they died, in the woods where no one ventured save a
few deer hunters during season. He took their rods and the fishing
gear to the truck. Then he found a place where he could drive the
truck truck over the side into the water. He stood in fascination,
watching it float out like a black ship to the river center before it
plummeted under.