NIGHT CRUISING (6 page)

He crooned into her ear
and made her happy to be alive before he slipped the knife from his
hair in the moonlight. She gasped upon seeing its glint, then fought
him with a fierceness bred of desperation. "You bastard!"
she screamed. Fighting him. Wrestling. Kicking and gouging "You
crazy motherfucking son of a bitch!"

It was a fight worth
remembering, but she succumbed in the end, her throat pumping blood
against Cruise's arm where it rested beneath the crook of her neck.

Cruise found three
hundred dollars folded neatly in her back pocket. "You could
have taken a plane," he whispered to her as he wrapped her in
the blanket, leaves sticking to it in the wet places. He moved her
body to the waiting hole he had dug earlier in the day in preparation
for a victim.

As the dream ended with
the burial and the cold water cleansing afterward, Cruise smiled in
his sleep. He felt again the cold slap of water, the shock and
breathtaking thrill of it. He felt the roughness of towel-drying his
body, the warmth of his clothes, the bracing scent of green forest
dew-deep and washed with night breeze. The best of all, though, was
the satisfaction he felt of having earned his way in the world
without taking any chances, without giving up anything of himself for
it.

Dirty Old Man never got
a good look at his face in the thick shadows of the truck stop. No
one knew who he was. They'd be looking for a trucker who offed a
whore. They wouldn't even look too long or too hard. Lot Lizards were
officially barred from all the truck stops across America now. The
ones who worked the trade took their chances. Minde happened to lose.

The sun dipped west.
Afternoon brought a damp chill with it. Shadows lengthened. Golfers
came off the course. Parents corralled their children from the
playground.

Molly sat in a swing
watching the car. She wound a length of hair around one finger and
put it between her small white teeth to chew. It had the texture of
tin foil.

She waited for Cruise
to wake and drive her across Texas. It had been a long, boring day,
but now with the night coming on, they'd be on the move.

Any minute now. Any
minute she'd see his large chest rise up in the seat and he'd beckon
to her.

The seconds slipped by
as the area continued to empty. A cooling breezy pressed at her
shoulders. Molly could smell the water from the goldfish pond a few
feet away from the swings. It smelled stagnant and unwholesome. Her
stomach rolled from the two Mars bars she had eaten for lunch. She
wanted to brush her teeth. She'd like a bath. She had washed in the
ladies' room in a service station, but that wasn't a bath. She didn't
feel any cleaner once she had done balling the brown hand towels and
throwing them in the trash.

She blinked with
surprise when Cruise sat upright in the Chrysler. Her mind had been
on hot showers and white, fragrantly scented, fluffy towels. She
stood, her bottom numb from the wooden swing seat. She saw there was
little light left. Shadows marched across the ground and obscured the
path.

Cruise started the car.
Switched on the headlights. Molly ran to the parking area and grabbed
the door handle.

"Hi," she
said breathlessly. She hoped he hadn't forgotten her, that he still
wanted her along. "Here I am."

"Yes," he
said. "There you are. It's time to travel."

The automatic street
lamps came on just as Cruise put the car into reverse.

Molly thought she'd
never be happier to see the last of a place. It seemed she had spent
weeks waiting for him to get enough sleep to drive through the night.

"Buckle up,"
he said. "Have a Coke. We'll eat later."

Molly grinned and did
as she was told. She could get used to funny old Cruise with his long
hair and strange sleeping habits. She could. What an adventure
running away from home was turning out to be!

Wouldn't her daddy just
die.

CHAPTER 2

THE SECOND NIGHT

Molly was wired, all
her senses jouncing to an internal beat. She hadn't slept much the
night before, and during the day she had wandered around the park
waiting for Cruise to wake. Now fatigue had taken over, but it left
her mind strung out like an addict looking for a fix. This happened
when she went too long without sleep. She chattered like a monkey
until her mind closed shop and faded to black.

"Sure was boring
hanging around all day while you were sleeping." She bit the
inside of her cheek. Real smart. Cruise was taking her to California,
and so far it was a free ride. She must try not to complain.

"I'm sorry about
that." He sounded genuinely upset. "I just can't drive in
the day. The light hurts my eyes."

She peered at him in
the gloom of the car. Dusk was thick and the sky was devoid of stars.
"You have a problem seeing?"

"Only in sunlight.
It's been that way since I was a kid. I'm a night person. You heard
of the lark and the owl? I'm the owl. The night is cooler, cleaner in
some ways. I like the shadows of trees and hills, the houses and
closed shops sleeping in the towns. I like neon. Ever notice how neon
lights sizzle? You walk beneath them on a sidewalk and you can hear
them. It's like bacon frying."

"How'd you go to
school if you stayed up all night?"

"I missed it as
much as I could." He smiled, remembering. She saw that. She
understood that. Wasn't she missing school? Wasn't school for idiots
anyway? All that regimentation. All those dumb authority games.
Principals and teachers playing like they were army sergeants.
Students kissing ass or acting up, one or the other. Just about
everyone on drugs. There was more LSD and pot in the schools than
there had ever been at the Woodstock concert. Straight kids were on
the make or trying to outdo everyone else. A dumb exercise in
futility for goobheads.

"I even like truck
stops," Cruise was saying.

"Truck stops?
Really?"

"It's the meeting
place for the underworld."

"Truckers, you
mean?"

"Yeah, truckers.
Their girls. Travelers. Night workers. They live like I do. On the
road driving, living in a machine with wheels on it, meeting
strangers . . ." He looked at her. She smiled, his stranger.

"I never knew
anyone who liked truck stops." She had never heard anyone even
mention truck stops.

"Most people don't
know about them. It's where everything's happening while the rest of
the world sleeps. Men are in there showering, doing their laundry,
shopping, eating breakfast at three in the morning. People are awake
in truck stops even in the middle of the darkest hours."

"I see you have a
CB. You talk to truckers too?"

He glanced at the mike
hanging from its slot below the radio. "I talk to them
sometimes."

"They're all
cowboys, right? Jeans and boots and big bellies?"

Cruise shook his bead.
"Not all of 'em. That's what people think. Maybe that's the way
it was years ago. Today these guys are the independents. They're the
men who won't work regular jobs, who don't fit in. And they're not
ignorant. You don't drive forty tons of steel at seventy miles an
hour and live to tell about it if you're stupid."

Molly brought her right
thumb to her lips and chewed softly on the fleshy part. "That's
cool beans." Though she wasn't sure she believed it.

"Cool beans."
He laughed. "Yeah."

"You ever drive
trucks?"

He smiled. "No,
not me. I do my cruising in four wheelers."

"That's why you're
called Cruise, right?"

"Sure. I told
you."

"Like they called
you Cruise when you were a kid, huh?"' She knew teasing him
might be a mistake, but she couldn't stop her mouth from running.
Nervous energy twanged through her until she was drops of water
dancing on hot coals.

"When I was a
kid," he said slowly, "I had an awful name."

"What was it?"

"Herod."

"Hmmm." She
sucked her thumb to keep from busting out with a derisive laugh.

"Herod. The king
who ordered the murder of all male babies in Jerusalem. He was trying
to do away with Christ, remember?"

She didn't, but she
believed him. "Why did your mom name you that then? You Jewish
or something?"

"No. She just had
a bad sense of humor, I guess. Or she didn't know her Bible. Probably
the latter. She gave us all formal-sounding names. Orson. Hortense.
Evelander. We call her Laurie, but my mother didn't approve. Collan,
Dorian. It goes on. I had a big family."

"Well, I like
Cruise better. Herod doesn't fit you, you know?"

"I didn't think so
either."

Molly fell silent, her
mind finally slowing a bit, enough for her to seize control of it.
The fatigue had made its sluggish way though her body, up her neck,
and was now beginning to circle the wagons in her skull. She blinked
sleepily.

"I knew a guy
once," Cruise began slowly.

Molly stretched in her
seat. She wondered if it had a lever that let the seat back the way
his seat reclined.

"This guy,"
Cruise continued, "went to Hollywood to write scripts for the
movies."

Molly's ears perked up.
"Did he? Write for the movies?"

She loved movies and
movie stars. Debra Winger. Rutger Hauer. Richard Gere. Cory Haime.
Now there was a guy you could sink your teeth into. When he acted he
always had his mouth open, even when he was a kid in the movies. Like
he was a fly-catcher, unofficially, of course.

"He wanted to real
bad," Cruise said. "He'd gone to one of those fancy
colleges out east and he'd studied and he wanted more than anything
to write screenplays. I met him in Hollywood. He was sitting in an
all-night cafe drinking coffee. We started talking."

"Yeah? I bet they
do that a lot--sit in cafes-- those writers."

"This one did.
See, he had a problem."

"He couldn't sell
any of his scripts."

"That's right. He
was up against the best. And this guy had money. He came from a
family with money so it wasn't like be had to make it in Hollywood.
But in another way he did. He had stopped taking money from his
mother. But she came over to his little apartment all the time,
bitching him out, asking him what he thought he was doing wasting
himself. He had graduated from Princeton or Harvard or some shit like
that. She wanted him to do something else. Be useful, make a real
living, have an office and a desk. On top of her nagging, she was
always sending over her maid to clean his place. Wouldn't even ask
him if he wanted that. She just did it."

"What an asshole.
She was on his case bad, huh?"

"Every chance she
got. And this guy, he was losing it. He was living like a pig and his
mind was going. Failure does that to some people. Not getting the
dream they think they deserve."

Molly said
thoughtfully, "I can feature that."

"So this guy
starts breaking out. He imagines things."

"Like what?
Winning an academy award?"

"Nothing that
wholesome. He started thinking he had worms and rats in his stomach.
He thought they were always coming out. He thought he vomited them."

"Oh, ga-ross. You
mean he told you this? Over coffee?"

"Yeah, we talked
all night. He said he was sure people were going to know soon. About
the things in his stomach. He said they moved around, beneath his
shirt, and someone was going to see it. Or he'd vomit and they'd
know. His mother came over so much, she was going to discover it. He
thought maybe someone had given him something, some kind of new
biological germ or something."

"Weirded out."

"That's what I
figured."

"So what happened
to him?"

"About a month
later I came back through Hollywood . I dropped by his apartment to
see him. When he let me in it smelled in there. Rancid, nasty. Like
vomit. He was carrying around a knife."

"What for?"

"For protection, I
guess. By then he was suspicious of everybody. I think he was getting
ready to kill the rats and worms he thought were coming out of his
mouth. I tried to talk him down, but. . ."

"Why didn't his
mom do something?"

"She was a bitch.
She didn't know he was a guy dying like that. She thought he was just
being stubborn or something. She thought she could nag him out of it.
Turn him into a contributing member of society. Make him into a top
executive."

"Could you help
him?"

"You don't help
someone who's carrying around a butcher knife. You don't even try."

"That's too bad."
Molly felt terrible. Rats in the stomach. God.

"The next time I
came through Hollywood, his apartment was empty. He was gone. He had
given me his mother's phone number. I called her and she said he'd
slit his throat. Over the sink. She didn't know why and she was
bawling so hard I hung up. But I know why he did it."

"Over the
sink?
"

"Yeah. When I was
there before he told me he always threw up in the kitchen sink so he
could flush those things down the disposal. It was the only way he
knew to get rid of them. Grind 'em up."

"Christ."

Cruise was silent.
Molly swallowed hard, the idea of a slit throat squeezing her neck
muscles tight.

"I've met some
strange folk," Cruise said finally.

"I bet. Rats and
worms. Ugh."

"If he'd just sold
one script," Cruise said.

"He might not have
gone crazy," Molly supplied.

"Maybe,"
Cruise agreed. "Maybe not."

Molly was no longer
sleepy. In fact she might not sleep for a year. She stared wide-eyed
out the windshield imagining the desperation it took to make someone
commit suicide over the top of a disposal.

#

He saw Molly nodding
now. She was tired, poor baby. Her waking and sleeping cycles did not
yet fit his own. She was still a day person. If he woke her every
couple of hours and kept her awake, he'd gradually change the cycles
until she too would sleep during the day. He'd let her snooze just a
little. Wake her again later.