Talk Talk (18 page)
And then there was Sandman. The College of Sandman.
Sandman had been around. His most recent infraction had, regrettably, involved a certain degree of forcible persuasion, which was why he'd been locked up here amongst the violent offenders. As Peck had. The rest of the inmates, to a man, were losers, the kind of scumbuckets and degenerates who deserved what was coming to them--after a year inside Peck felt like a Republican: lock them up and throw away the key--but Sandman was different. He was educated. He believed in things--the environment, clean air, clean water. The man could go on for hours about restoration ecology or the reintroduction of the wolf and how capitalism had sucked up all the resources of the world just to spit them back out as hair dryers--he had a real thing for hair dryers--and greenback dollars. Six-three, tattooed over most of his body, with a physique honed in the weight room, Sandman, who wasn't much older than he was, showed him the way. “You know how they say, 'Be all you can be'? In those Army recruiting ads? Well, I say, 'Be anybody you can be.'”
He was talking about the Internet. He was talking about the greed of the credit card companies, online auto loans, instant credit, social security numbers skimmed at the fast-food outlet and the gas station and up for sale on half a dozen sites for twenty-five dollars per. He was talking about Photoshop and color copiers, government seals, icons, base identifiers. The whole smorgasbord. “Be anybody you can be.”
Two hundred dollars. That was the gate money they gave you when you walked out the door after eleven and a half months of chopping cabbage, dicing onions and sucking up the reek of the grill, burgers, dogs, sloppy Joe on a bun, strip steak that was like jerky softened in water and then jerked all over again. Most of the morons blew the whole two hundred the first day on women and drugs and then they were out on the street trying on one scam or another and the probation officer just begging for a chance to send them back up. But not Peck, not William Peck Wilson.
He went straight back to Peterskill--to the office park on Route 6 where the orthopedists and urologists and pediatricians had their offices. Out back were the Dumpsters. It took him maybe an hour, slinking around like an immigrant bagging cans for redemption, and he had what he wanted: a sheaf of discarded medical forms, replete with names, addresses, birth dates and social security numbers. Then he sat in a bar over a scotch and made a phone call to Dudley, the busboy, because he needed two things: a ride and a connection. Dudley, he reasoned, was the very man to hook him up with a false ID because Dudley had been clubbing since he was sixteen in a state where the drinking age was twenty-one, and he wasn't disappointed. For less than half his gate money, Peck was able to get himself a social security card and driver's license, with color photo, in the name of one of the patients at A&O Medical, and after that it was easy. He opened a checking account with the remaining hundred dollars and started writing checks for merchandise, which he turned around and sold for cash, installed himself in a hotel and applied for Visa and American Express cards. Once the cards arrived he took a cab out to the local Harley dealer. He'd always wanted a Harley, ever since he'd seen “Easy Rider” on TV as a kid, and Sandman had stoked him on the idea during their late-night fantasy excursions, a whole vista opening up in the shadows, blooming like a radiant perfect flower, the vision so intense he could feel the wind in his hair and see the sun spread like liquid gold across the road in front of him.
The dealer was a fat-faced longhair with what they called a hitch in his git-along, wearing a leather Harley jacket over an embroidered white shirt and some sort of racing medallion dangling on a cord from his throat. He was clueless, absolutely clueless. And Peck Wilson sat down with him and neatly signed all the paperwork in his new name, the credit references sterling, the bike--an Electra Glide in black with the Harley logo a sweet blaze of red on the swell of the fuel tank--being prepped even as they ran each other a line of bullshit about unholy speeds and wrecks and wild men they'd known, and then he swung a leg over the thing, fired it up with an annunciatory roar and blew on down the road and out of town. For good.
It wasn't quite dawn yet, the stars gone a shade paler in the eastern sky and Mount Tam to the west still an absence in the deep slough of dark and fog. Nothing had been moving fifteen minutes earlier when he'd backed out of the garage for a run to the coffee shop, and now, as the heavy wooden door slapped shut behind him, he eased himself out of the car with the cardboard tray--the same stuff they made egg cartons out of, and how was it he'd never noticed that before? Balanced there, in the molded slots, were two large double lattes and a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and a white paper bag of assorted croissants and half a dozen éclairs to glut Madison into a sugary road-enhanced daze. She didn't travel well, and that was going to be a problem, but Natalia had spent a couple hundred bucks on coloring books and a miniature farm set and videos for the TV monitor built into the back of the seat.
The coffee was hot, the croissants still warm, but instead of going right upstairs with them, he set the cardboard tray on the hood of the car and eased open the side door next to the garage. For a long moment he stood there, watching, listening, taking in the cold rich damp scent of the sea for the last time. And then, just to satisfy himself, he took a quick stroll through the lot, checking the cars that sat inert under the thin skin of the dew. He was calm, breathing easily, feeling optimistic about what lay ahead, though he hated having to leave--hated being forced out, hated the miserable interfering sons of bitches who'd come after him and turned everything upside down--and when he'd gone through the lot, he walked the gravel path all the way round the perimeter, the mist (what was it Madison called it?--the breath of the bay) rising up to envelop him and let him go again.
Natalia was perched on the edge of the couch, in a green velvet suit jacket, skirt, stockings, heels, waiting for him. She was applying her makeup--she never went anywhere, not even down to the corner store for a box of crackers, without her makeup--when he came through the door. She didn't smile. Didn't even look up from her compact. “Madison is still sleeping,” she said.
He set the tray down before her like the offering it was. “Good. Maybe I can just carry her out to the car and she won't wake up till we get to Tahoe, what do you think?”
She didn't answer. He'd packed everything the night before--early into the morning, actually, and he was exhausted, looking forward to the hotel, the fresh sheets, room service, the blissful anonymity--and he noticed with a tick of satisfaction that the new matching overnight bags, Natalia's and Madison's, had been set by the door. The hassling was over, the pouting, the arguments, the tears, the pleading and the demands, and the new phase was about to begin. They were minutes from being out of here, turn the key and never look back.
“I got her hot chocolate,” he said, “the kind she likes, from the bakery? And éclairs. For a special treat.”
Natalia was not the sort of mother to buzz over a child's sugar intake. To her mind, whatever you could squeeze out of a glutted overblown capitalistic society was a good in itself, and éclairs were the smallest expression of it. A look for him now, above the mirror. “Yes,” she said, faintly amused, conciliatory, “that is very nice. You are a very nice man”--and he could see she wanted to speak his name, wanted to say “Da-na,” but checked herself. She bent forward to remove the plastic lid of the takeout cup. “This is the double latte?”
“They both are.”
She brought the cup to her lips, the white foam clinging like drift to the waxen sheen of her lipstick before her tongue melted it away. The simple animal satisfactions, sugar, cream, caffeine. He reached for his own cup. The smell of coffee, reminiscent and forward-looking at the same time, filled the room. “Very nice,” she concluded, the fingers of one hand probing at the neck of the confectioner's bag even as she sipped at the latte and gave him a glossy uncomplicated smile.
They were complicit. He felt gratitude for that, for what she was giving up for him, for her trust and faith, and he swore to himself in that moment that he'd do everything in his power to live up to it. Easing himself down on the back of the sofa, he ran a hand over the side of her face, caressing an ear, letting her hair sift through his fingers. “I am,” he said. “I am a nice guy.” And he meant it.
The coffee was still warm in the pit of his stomach when he lifted Madison out of her bed and carried her down to the car. She'd folded herself up in the fetal position, her thumb in her mouth, hair fallen across her face in a silken swirl, and he took the blankets and bedding with her, one big bundle, the warmth rising from the furnace of her, her pupils roaming beneath the lids in dreamtime, and how could he not think of Sukie, of his own daughter, back in Peterskill and as remote from him as an alien on another planet? As he laid Madison across the backseat and folded the blankets over her bare feet, he had a fleeting picture of the two of them together, the two girls, at the park--at Depew Park, in Peterskill--running hand in hand through the dandelions and the long amber grass, white legs flashing in concert.
It was a mistake to go back to Peterskill, he knew it--he'd known it all along. But it sang to him in his blood--it was what he knew--and his daughter was there. And Sandman. There was a house in Garrison, up in the woods and with a view of the Hudson, late nineteenth century, stone, with hand-hewn beams, remodeled in what Sandman called the prevailing bourgeois fashion and dernier cri of consumer convenience, and it was his for the taking, fifty-five hundred a month with an option to buy, Sandman contributing the deposit and talking up the owners, who were retiring to Florida but not yet entirely sure they wanted to give up the house for good, the credit check done and the papers just waiting there for Bridger Martin to blow into town and affix his signature. That was all to the good, and after vagabonding around the country on a nice extended vacation, it would be a relief to get there and start over--the schools “were” good and Natalia could shop till she dropped in Manhattan. He wouldn't want to hit any of the old haunts, though, wouldn't want to run into anybody, even his mother-especially her. Or Gina. It wouldn't do to have people calling him Peck, not anymore. But Garrison was the next town up the line and he figured he'd be spending most of his time in the City, anyway, and with Sukie it was just a matter of hooking back up with the lawyer and getting those Sunday visits quietly arranged again. He was just “Dad” to her, not Peck or Dana or Frank or Bridger, just “Dad,” and no one the wiser. Or maybe that was a dream. Maybe the cops would be waiting for him at McDonald's, because why wouldn't Gina sell him out, why wouldn't her mother?
“You are ready?” Natalia slid into the seat beside him. She was wearing a pink visor with a designer logo that had probably cost fifty bucks, fifty bucks at least. When she saw he was looking at it, she said, “For travel. For the sun. Is there not sun in Las Vegas?”
“Yeah,” he said, distracted, “yeah, there is. Good thinking.” He flicked the remote for the garage door and the pallid light flooded in. He was thinking of what they were leaving behind, of how everything, from his knives to his saucepans to the Viking convection oven and the new microwave, would occupy their niches until the place was sold and everything the new owners didn't want or couldn't use was dumped in the trash. No regrets, he told himself as he started up the car--one of the finest production cars in the world, in the history of the world--and backed out into the morning.
What he didn't notice--what he failed to notice because he was still there, upstairs, roaming the uninhabited rooms of the condo, lingering in his mind over all the dispensable things they'd accumulated and left in their wake--was the black Jetta, pulling out behind him.
HE'D FALLEN ASLEEP, couldn't help himself, so exhausted he might as well have been drugged, and when he woke the side of his face was pressed up against the window of the car and Dana was clinging to him like a spare set of clothes, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized with his own. There was a faint gray infusion of light. Nothing moved. The yellow lamp at the end of the lot was a blur, perched somewhere in intermediate space, the fog wiping away everything else. His left arm had gone numb where he'd slept on it, and his shirt felt damp and gummy, the price of sleeping in the car. Which smelled stale, as if they'd been living in it for months and not just overnight, and he wondered about that, about the odors of confinement, and for a moment he closed his eyes and the car was a bathyscaphe dangling over an abyss in the dark canyons of the sea, the twisting shapes of the deep fish, the wolf fish and coelacanth, passing in review. Then he opened them again on nothing, on a seep of grayness, and thought to check his watch.
Slowly, with exaggerated care--no reason to wake her yet--he extricated his dead arm and brought his wrist into view. He wasn't surprised particularly to see that it was just before six in the morning--a horrendous hour, an hour he encountered maybe two or three times a year when he lost his head partying with Deet-Deet or Pixel and fell into the old ineluctable videogame trance--but he did feel just the slightest tic of irritation with the fact that he wasn't in a bed in a motel sleeping till noon, noon at least. He'd been the one for giving it up the night before--they had the wrong condo; the guy had moved or died or been jettisoned into outer space--but Dana had been insistent. Even as he was wheeling out of the lot, bent on finding a place to eat and a motel with cable, she was brandishing her worn file folder, inside of which were the affidavit from the San Roque courthouse and the faxes with the thief's police record and photo. “This,” she said, spitting it out, “is all we need. Show this to the police and we've got him.”
“Right, but we have to find him first,” he'd said, exasperated, but still turning his face to her so she could see him form the words. “And when we find him, then what? Where are the cops? You think they'll just happen to be driving by?”
“I dial 911. As soon as I see him. I dial 911 and say there's a crime in progress, a--a burglary, okay? A crime in progress.”
“And then what?”
“Then I show them this”--the folder--“because isn't this a crime? In progress? Isn't it?”
They were out on the main road by then, the headlights of the oncoming cars illuminating her face in flashes, as if they were back under the strobe at Doge and he was seeing her for the first time. For a moment, he felt himself slipping into nostalgia, into tenderness--she'd never seemed more beautiful, her eyes struck with light, her lips parted with the onrush of her rhetoric, her face held aloft and glowing in the excelsior of her hair, like a gift in a box--but he resisted it. He was hungry, tired. He was looking for a place to eat, nothing fancy, a burger, anything. She was right, he knew it, but he wasn't ready to admit that yet, not until he had something in his stomach, anyway.
“What are you doing?” she demanded then. “Giving up?”
A fast-food place loomed up on the left and he flicked on the blinker and hit the gas to spin into the lot ahead of the oncoming traffic. All in one motion he nosed into a parking space, jammed the lever into park and swung round to face her. “No,” he said, “I'm not giving up. I'm just hungry, that's all. It's been a long day, don't you think? Can't we just sit here for half an hour and have a Big Mac and a Filet o' Fish--no, no, forget the calories, forget the cholesterol and trans fats, let's just gorge for once--and think things out? Because we're close, I know it, you're right, and we can nail this bastard, absolutely, but let's just take a minute to regroup, okay? And eat?”
He didn't know how much of that she got--he never did know with her, but he was always conscious of his lips and his tongue and he liked to think they were communicating. That was the case now. They sat there a moment under the yellow-and-red glare of the big M and he watched her flip the hair away from her face with a quick thrust of her chin. Her eyes narrowed. Her voice went low, so low it was as if she'd just been punched in the stomach. “She was lying, you know.”
And so here they were.
They'd stocked up on grease and nitrates and sugar, Dana so anxious she was lifting right out of her shoes while he ordered and paid and then she looked at him as if he were a pedophile when he told her he had to use the men's--“What if we miss him?” she signed. “What if he's coming in right now? Right this minute?” In the car, the brown bag in her lap, her fish sandwich as yet untouched, she kept saying, “You know he's in there, you know it--or wherever he is, he'll be back--and what we need to do is just sit there all night, all day tomorrow, all week if necessary, and keep the binoculars on those windows till we see him for sure. Positive identification, isn't that what they call it? And that's it. We see him, he's”--one of her favorite expressions--“dead meat.”
But they hadn't seen him. The curtains were closed when they got back--they hadn't been gone more than half an hour, forty-five minutes--and the curtains stayed closed all night long, though the lights had burned late, very late. So late they were the last thing Bridger remembered, seared into his consciousness like the afterimage of a whole raft of flashbulbs going off simultaneously. He glanced up now. The fog bellied, drifted, pressed and released. The cars were dark humps, the trees erased. Above and beyond him, cutting perfect rectangles out of the shadow of something larger, were the windows--Frank Calabrese's windows--still lit.
When finally the garage door became visible beneath the glow of the windows and finally--suddenly, abruptly--it began to rise in silent levitation to reveal the rear lights of the car glowing there like a visual affront, he thought he was dreaming. It was like a trompe l'oeil, the flat plane of the door there one minute and effaced the next. Was he seeing things? But no, there was the back end of the car, a Mercedes, dealer plates, the exhaust leaching from the tailpipe to vanish in the fog, and now the double punch of the brake lights--and the thing was moving, backing out. He shoved Dana, hard. Pushed her from him and took hold of her face in both his hands, working the swivel of her delicately jointed neck as if it were some instrument he'd found and calibrated, as if it were his: “Look,” he was saying, “look.”
Her hair, her eyes, the sourness of sleep on her breath--none of it mattered. She was there instantaneously, up out of the depths, with him. Her body tensed and she was sitting upright, staring into the mist, her mouth gone slack in concentration. And then, instinctively, she sank down in the seat--and her hands were on him, pulling him down too, her voice blunted and featureless, forced into use before she was ready: “It's him.”
The Mercedes had pulled out now, the rear wheels swinging to the left as the driver brought the car around, and there was a figure at the wheel, indistinct behind the windshield and the tatters of the fog, and was it a man? Was it him? Bridger was transfixed. He was sunk so low in the seat his chin was on a level with the armrest, adrenaline surging, hide-and-seek, and then the car righted its course and sliced up the drive in the silence of dreamtime and there he was--unmistakable--the thief, the son of a bitch, his chin cocked, eyes fixed on the road ahead, and the woman, the liar, beside him. For a moment Bridger was frozen there, watching the taillights lift and dip over the speed bumps, and then Dana's hand was on his wrist and her voice was hammering at him in all its weird unmodulated hyperventilating urgency: “Start-the-car-start-the-car!”
Already the brake lights were vanishing in the fog. His hand trembled at the ignition. Once, twice, then the engine turned over and he slammed the thing into reverse, lurched out of the spot and forced it into drive even as he jerked at the wheel and reached for the lights--but her hand was there, her face looming into his field of vision: “No, no--no lights, no lights!”
There wasn't any traffic, and that was a good thing, because he was so intent on the taillights ahead of him he didn't even give a glance as he swung out of the drive and onto the blacktop road. He hit the gas. The wheels spun and grabbed with a chirp, and there was that familiar feeling of the headlong rush, the g-forces, the sudden heaviness in the flesh. Two red spots. He was chasing two red spots. The fog parted, jumped and swayed and gave up its substance, and then it closed in again, and he was having trouble gauging where the road gave way to the shoulder, to the ditch running alongside it, and that would be something, wouldn't it, to veer off the road and blow a tire, break an axle, ram a tree--a whole forest? She was saying something, the words garbled with her excitement, and her hands were moving in frantic semaphore, but it was all he could do to keep going, no lights, no lights, the two red spots his only means of orientation.
The road swept round to the right, then a hairpin to the left, and the lights vanished and came back again. “Stay back!” Dana was saying. That was what it was: “Stay back!”
His own voice was strangled with the tension, and his tone--the abruptness of it, the quick snap and release--startled him. “I am, for shit's sake. What do you think I'm doing?” And then, the wheel riding through the clench of his fingers: “I can't see. Shit. Fuck. You want to wind up in a ditch?”
But then the taillights dilated suddenly, right there, right there ahead of him, and his foot slammed at the brake--it was a stop sign, a stop sign emerging fuzzily from the mist, and the man in the Mercedes was observing the law, full stop, though there wasn't another car on the road--and here was Dana, unbelted and lurching forward like a loose sack of groceries. The sound of her head striking the windshield was like a thunderclap, an explosion. He heard himself curse even as the wheels locked on the fog-slick pavement and the car spun across the road, the taillights of the Mercedes moving away now, dwindling, and he wanted to say “Are you all right?” but she wouldn't have heard him, anyway.
The car was running. They were on the road--in the wrong lane, maybe, but on the road. His eyes swiped at her and he saw the blood there, just beneath her hairline, a fresh wet shock of it, but his foot was on the accelerator--he couldn't help himself--and she, clapping both palms to her head so he couldn't see anything of her eyes or the wound either, let her voice jerk free: “Just go!”
There were other cars now, dragged forward on chains of light, moving like submarines in a reconfigured sea. The wheel felt heavy in his hands. There was the muffled hiss of the tires, his heart in high gear still, a pair of yellow fog lights glowing in the rearview, the Mercedes just ahead. He must have asked Dana twenty times if she was all right--did she need a doctor, should he take her to the hospital--but she wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the back end of the Mercedes. She was belted in now and she'd dug a T-shirt out of her bag and pressed it to the wound at her hairline; when he glanced at her, all he could see was that shirt, and it wasn't white any longer. On the inside of the windshield, where her head had hit, a crystal star had formed, a thin tracery of lines radiating from its center in rays of prismatic light. He took one hand from the wheel and tugged at her knee till she turned her face to him. “You're bleeding,” he said. “The shirt is full of blood.”
Her voice wafted to him as if from a great distance, the tires hissing, the wipers beating time: “It's nothing. A bump, that's all.”
“A bump? Didn't you hear me? You're bleeding.”
“We can't stop now,” she said, turning away from him, and that was that. Discussion over. For a moment they went on in silence, cars emerging out of the gloom, a Safeway truck humping along in the opposite lane, its hazard lights flashing. And then suddenly she was doing something with her hands, something manic, and the shirt dropped away from the wound, a raw spot there, a slit like a mouth, red and raw. “But look, look,” she was saying, and his eyes jerked back to the road, “his blinker. He's heading for the freeway.”
The wheel was concrete, it was lead, it weighed more than the car itself, but Bridger managed to crank it round and follow the Mercedes up the ramp and onto 101, headed north, the roadway opening up across its lanes to a jerking unsteady convoy of trucks and the sleek shot arrows of pickups and cars homing in on some unseen target in the distance. “Eureka,” she said, her voice charged with excitement. “He's going to Eureka. Or Oregon.”
He said, “Yeah, maybe,” and fell back to allow a battered blue pickup to insert itself between him and the Mercedes.
“He's leaving town. He's running.”
Was he? Had they got to him? Had they put a scare in him?
Suddenly he felt exhilarated, felt as if he could do anything--he was The Kade and this guy, this bad guy, was an extra in a lizard mask, a walk-on, nothing. He gritted his teeth, bore down on the wheel. “This time, brother,” he said to himself, “you're the one going to jail, and we'll just see how you like it.” But then what was the plan? Should they call 911? His mind was racing. What would they say? That there was a criminal loose, that he'd stolen someone's identity--Dana's identity, a young woman's, a deaf woman's--and he was right ahead of them on 101 in a red Mercedes with dealer plates? That he was running. That he was getting away. But where was the proof? They would have to be there when he was pulled over, because if they weren't the cops would just let him go--he wasn't even speeding. This guy--and Bridger could just make him out in silhouette through the back window of the pickup and the intervening lenses of the pickup's windshield and the slanted rear window of the Mercedes--was driving as if he was on his way to church. And maybe he was. Maybe he'd pull off the freeway and amble up to some big glass and stucco cathedral and they'd roll in behind him and have the cops nail him right there when he was down on his knees cleansing his soul. Wouldn't that be ironic? Because that was him, definitely him, and as long as they stayed with him there was no way he was going to get out of this.