NIGHT CRUISING (5 page)

"It should be
getting daylight when we get somewhere in Texas."

Hours later while Molly
dozed on and off, waking only long enough to ask where they were now,
Cruise noticed the lightening of the sky. It looked as if the heavens
were a bowl of pewter turned down over the land. Stars winked out.
The moon disappeared. Strips of fleecy clouds formed on the low
horizon.

He had crossed
Henderson Swamp, the Sabine River, and the Neches. He took the Walden
Road exit in Beaumont, Texas, passed a monster-size Metro Truck Stop
that he gave a wistful glance. He continued past it, crossed a
railroad track, and drove down a road called Terrell Park Drive where
there was a golf course and older suburban homes. He turned into a
paved area by a park where swings and jungle gyms hunkered in wisps
of early morning eddies of fog. He killed the engine.

Molly woke abruptly.
Looked around. She stretched like a cat limbering up for the day
ahead. He envied those who could stand the light. They were normal in
that respect where he was not, he understood that implicitly.

"Texas?" she
asked.

"Yeah. I'm going
to sleep now. Do what you want to do. There's a little store back
there if you want anything. Here's five bucks." He handed her
the bill.

"Do you want me to
wake you in a little while?"

"No. I'll wake on
my own."

He reached beside the
seat and depressed the lever. The back folded down until it hit the
back bench seat. He felt on the rear floorboard for the folded
kitchen towel he kept there, draped it over his eyes.

He heard Molly unbuckle
her seat belt and leave the car.

He fell to sleep almost
immediately, bird song and the squeak of swing chains in his ears.

In his dreams he
relived the high and low points of his life. His past trailed him
into sleep and always had. When he had been a boy, he dreamed of
babyhood. When a teen, he dreamed of boyhood. Now he dreamed of the
entire fabric of life he'd lived to the present.

Always in trouble with
authority, mainly his father, he had taken on a decidedly secretive
nature. He came from a big brawling family of children who were
mercilessly beaten by their heavy-handed father. So bad were those
days that when he dreamed of them, he wept in his sleep and woke to
find his face wet with tears. His father did not drink. He did not
curse. He did not whore or fail to bring home a paycheck.
Nevertheless, he was cruelly warped in some essential way, part of
his humanity driven so deep underground that it would never come to
the fore. He suffered no breach of his ironclad rule, but his rule
was too strict for even a hardened soldier, much less a child, so
they all failed him; they all, his five brothers, his four sisters,
courted and promptly received daily punishment.

There was the time they
were lined up before their brutal father to recite the alphabet. They
ranged in age from three years old to fourteen. Cruise had been six.
When one of them failed to speak loudly enough or faltered in the
singsong recitation of letters, his father struck out fiercely with a
wide belt across their faces.
Their faces!

Then there was the time
Cruise, growing ever more rebellious and volatile, tried to run away.
He was twelve. His father brought him back and chained him to the
metal kitchen table leg for a week. It was forbidden for the others
to speak to him, and he was fed scraps like a dog, like a mongrel dog
begging favor.

When Cruise reached
adulthood he wandered the county like a vagabond, working just long
enough to provide funds to keep on the move. It was as if he stayed
in one spot long enough, his past would catch up with him and swallow
him whole, make him mad, destroy the only peace of mind he could ever
find.

When at first the idea
came to him that he could kill rather than work or steal, that
killing was a living, a way of life, he wasn't at all shocked by the
thought. He had committed murder early on and the lesser crime of
robbery without being caught, so the thought of punishment held no
sway. His father knew how to punish. The law swatted, it stung, it
didn't punish.

He came to the
conclusion, after long years thinking about it, that he could not lay
the blame for his ways on his upbringing, on his father. As far as he
knew none of his nine brothers or sisters displayed a violent streak.
The same childhood that molded them, and allowed a sort of normalcy,
also shaped him. No, he couldn't, like Henry Lee Lucas, go around
currying forgiveness because of his horrid past. He couldn't ask the
psychologists, who were so eager to find reason to blame murder on
background.

It wasn't Daddy's
fault. It wasn't Mommy's fault. Though for some time he might have
liked to claim that convenient excuse. He knew deep down it was a
lie, a damned lie if he bought it.

The truth, as far as
he'd been able to deduce it, was that he hadn't the ambition or the
patience to be "normal." It did not suit his taste. It made
him want to cringe to think of living with a wife, begetting
children, working a steady job, paying for a mortgage. An abnormal
life-style suited him. Like his father before him, he could not live
according to the edicts of others. Not that abnormality was a proven
fact in his mind. Maybe the rest of the world had adopted rites and
rituals they merely thought normal. They had all accepted a cultural
image and agreed upon it. Majority rule. That did not mean he had to.

As far as that goes,
there were plenty who didn't fit the ordinary pattern. They might not
kill, as he did, in order to live, but how normal was it to spend a
life as a politician, for example? Conning people, making
concessions, playing a strange power game. Or how normal was it to be
an artist, to spend a life committed to paint or music or dance or
words? And what about geniuses? Did the scientist who stared into the
universe and expound on reaching the edge of space lead a normal
existence? His thoughts had to be so far removed from the mundane
world that he might even be considered another species of human. Or
was the pious monk chanting in his solitary retreat on a mountain
slope different from others? The monk, the artist, so many people who
didn't fit the pattern, who couldn't get with the program, but no one
called them insane or abnormal. He decided they were just as deformed
as he.
Or.
They were just as normal.

Cruise finally shook
down the idea until he thought he belonged to an elite worldwide
group of people who did not fit, who were oddities for one reason or
another. There were no monsters or saints in the world he understood.
There were no laws he recognized, being above and beyond all law and
lawgivers. There were no morals in any book, religious or otherwise,
that could make him place guilt upon his shoulders.

Cruise Lavanic would
not grovel in the mud and blame the past or any of the people who
made it the hell it was.

There was no blame.

It was, all aspects
taken under consideration, simply easier to kill than to rob, to kill
than to settle in and work and let the world grind him down.

Once he'd come to this
conclusion, he went on his way satisfied he was not a madman, insane,
or clinically verifiable. If anything, he was superior to the rest of
mankind for he'd been able to throw off the shackles of a binding,
suffocating, deadening culture that said his bread must come from
labor, that he should live in a house and keep a woman, that he
should own property and buy more obsolete merchandise than he could
use. He would not watch television six hours a day, pay his heavy
unfair burden of taxes, and shop at the discount stores on weekends.

He wouldn't. He didn't.
And when he dreamed of murders he had committed they came to him
without a layer of guilt, stripped of moral object lessons, and
nothing if not thrilling.

He woke once, the towel
having slipped from his eyes.

Sun blinded him with
shafts like fire and his eyes watered instanty. The girl Molly was
nowhere around. So what? He didn't care. She'd be back.

He turned onto his side
in the lowered seat, draped the towel again, and drifted off.

He had been dreaming of
the Lot Lizard he did in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was his last
kill, still fresh in his mind. He now reached for her and for the
pleasantness of the dream. Entering the dreamscape, he saw himself
walking toward a picnic table set on gravel behind a trailer. It was
a truck stop just north of Charlotte. It was a weekend when the truck
drivers generally were laid over with their loads until Monday
deliveries. The lots were packed, trucks lined up side by side, row
by row, deep, thick, growling machines that rumbled day and night.

The trailer was a
makeshift trucker's lounge with a color TV, ratty living-room
furniture boasting scarred pine armrests, and a few video arcade
games. The picnic table sat behind it, crooked, leaning in the gray
gravel. To each side of the table the trucks purred like fat, hungry
predator cats. Cruise had been parked at this truck stop listening on
his CB to the truckers talk in their peculiar lingo.

They called
plaintively, as the sun set and their loneliness deepened, for "Baby
Dolls," the polite euphemism for Lot Lizards. Cruise recognized
the voice of one trucker who called himself Dirty Old Man. He, more
than all the others, persistently made a plea for female
companionship.

"C'mon, Baby
Dolls, where y'all at tonight? I'm looking for some commercial
company. C'mon and talk to your Dirty Old Man."

Every few minutes Dirty
Old Man made his call. When it was full dark a feminine voice
answered back.

"Hello there,
boys. This here Baby Doll is on the prowl. Are there any interested
parties out there?"

Dirty Old Man
immediately piped up. His voice was low and grizzled as he said, "Oh,
Baby Doll, I've been waiting just about forever to meet you, honey,
Where you at, Sugar? What's your ten-twenty?"

The sultry voice
returned. Now all the truckers were listening, having abandoned their
rambling complaints about layovers and long hours and not getting
home when promised. "I'm over here near Jack's," she said.
"Where you at, baby?"

Cruise squirmed in his
seat. He loved listening in on these assignations. It had a
voyeuristic flavor that kept a smile glued to his lips. He turned up
the volume control on the CB. She was right here near Jack's Truck
Stop somewhere.

He could get to her
first if she would say where she'd meet her trick.

"Darnit, Baby
Doll," Dirty Old Man crooned. He chuckled, almost went into a
coughing spree in his eagerness. "I'm over here at the 76 Truck
Stop and you're over there under the sign with the big blue star.
What you look like, Doll?"

"I got the bluest
eyes and I'm pretty as a picture. Why don't you come on over here to
Jack's and see for yourself? I'll wait for you at the picnic table
behind the lounge."

A barrage of male
voices all came on at once to vie for her attention.

"Mind if I come
too, Baby Doll?"

"Hooo doggie,
commercial company!"

"You got any
friends?"

"You gonna be busy
later, Baby Doll of the blue eyes?"

Cruise heard her key
the mike and laugh a sensual laugh that must have set the boys
slobbering over their knees. "There's just me, sweeties, but we
got all night. Y'all come on out, you hear? Let's do us some partying
down."

Cruise, having parked
at a strategic point that gave him a wide view of Jack's, watched
from his Chrysler as the girl walked out of nowhere toward the picnic
table. She was about five feet three, short blond hair chopped in a
boyish cut, wearing jeans and a prim light pink blouse with
embroidery on the collar. She wasn't young. Middle thirties, he
guessed.

He got to her before
Dirty Old Man or any of the others, just as he supposed he would.

"Hi, Hon,"
she said, putting her arm familiarly around his waist as he walked
up. "I'm Minde. M-i-n-d-e. Now I don't do this sort of thing for
a living, you know. Trucker dumped me here in Charlotte with no way
home. I never been in that predickerment before. I'm from St. Louis
and I don't have no way back there unless I get a little help from a
friend."

Cruise had heard all
the stories whores told and this one was terribly uncreative, but no
matter, he didn't want her for her brain. She looked relatively
clean, and at least she wasn't fat. She might have weighed slightly
over a hundred, but not much. And from having rested his hand on her
rump, he knew she had stashed some money. Not smart of her, but her
profession wasn't known for having smarts.

"Come on with me,"
he said, giving her the smile they loved. "I'll get you to St.
Louis."

As they started walking
away, a dusty, bug-splattered Mack rolled across the gravel drive.
The driver braked on seeing them. The roar of the engine drowned
their ears with a rumble that shook the ground beneath them. Churned
gravel dust hung in the air. The man climbed down from the cab to
block their way. "I'm Dirty Old Man. Are you my Baby Doll?"

Minde looked up at
Cruise. She looked back at the bedraggled old fellow with his gut
hanging out and his day-old unshaven gray chin. "Sorry, Dirty
Old Man. I might see you later. Never can tell. You keep listening
for me. you hear?"

Cruise swept her past
him without saying a word. There were going to be some horny drivers
tonight when Minde didn't come back. But then it was early. There
might be more Lot Lizards prowling the lots before the night was out.
If there weren't, let all the poor suckers jack off.

Minde didn't make it to
St. Louis. She didn't make it out of the state of North Carolina, the
redbird state. She died south of Charlotte in a patch of forest off a
dirt road that would't see a bulldozer for years. Cruise made love to
her first. That's the way he thought of it.
Lovemaking.