NIGHT CRUISING (23 page)

The first thing she had
to do--and she thought this the most mature idea she might have ever
had--the first thing was to admit to her helplessness and ignorance.
She didn't know anything about killers or how to keep one from taking
her life. She was not wise, not experienced, not smart enough to be
on her own. She needed help from somewhere or she was doomed.

Okay. She admitted to
those sins. But what could she do about finding help? Lannie wasn't
going to do anything for her. Not one single thing. If she was sorry
for her, she hid the fact pretty damn well. Molly thought something
had gone wrong with Lannie's emotions. They had jumped the track to
disappear into a dark muffled place where she didn't feel anymore.
Whereas Cruise's emotions were always at the edge, ready to explode
into enough rage to take a life, Lannie admitted nothing to faze her.

So the sister and the
father were out, as far as helping her went. That meant Molly had to
stay alive until she got close enough to someone else who might help
her. A gas station attendant. Another motorist. A waitress in a cafe.
A passing patrol car. She must gain the attention of someone along
the way who could come to her aid.

There was just one
problem. She didn't know how long she had left. If Cruise had killed
for all those years, had he also taken kids like her on his many
death trips? If he did, what happened to them? Easy to answer that,
but she tried to keep the thought at bay. It was too terrifying.
Since none of them had ever turned him in, they must be unable to.

They were dead.

That's what she was
going to be if she didn't get lucky real soon.

She hung her head,
rested it on her upraised knees. It didn't matter that much anymore
about her physical discomfort. The tub was cold, but it wasn't as
cold as a grave. The mildew, the chlorine scent, the steadily
dripping faucet--they were just slight irritations. The ropes hurt,
but they weren't going to kill her. Her bones ached, her muscles were
cramped, but she was young, strong, healthy. None of these
discomforts were so unbearable. She was hungry, but she wasn't
starving.

She'd find someone.
She'd stop giving Cruise a hard time. She'd keep her mouth closed,
her smart-ass comments to herself. She'd do exactly what he wanted.
She'd try to enter into conversations when he wanted to talk. She
wouldn't say anything to upset him.

There had to be help
somewhere if she lived long enough to find it.
She was too young
to die, God , please.
She hadn't done anything so wrong that she
deserved to die.

She would make her own
luck and get out of this alive.

The other alternative
was unacceptable. Dying wasn't on Molly Killany's agenda this year.

THE SIXTH NIGHT

Cruise woke clammy cold
with sweat. He smelled a sweet stench rising from his body as if he
had perspired all the Cokes he had consumed over a lifetime.

He had been tortured by
one of those nightmares that were flashbacks from his childhood. This
one had been so vivid that even now he brushed his arms to get off
the dirt.

He and his two older
brothers were playing outdoors. Their parents were in town shopping,
leaving them alone for several hours. It was a Saturday, summertime,
suffocatingly hot. They were bored, the juvenile wildness rising in
them to such heights that they felt impelled to whoop and holler as
they chased one another around the frame house. Lannie came onto the
front porch yelling for them to stop acting like "wild Injuns,"
but they ignored her warnings.

Tiring of the game of
chase, rolling and wrestling on the grass in the backyard, Cruise
thought of something to cool them off.

"Let's dig holes
and get in them," he said. "That's what dogs do to get
cool. It's better than walking all the way to the creek to go
swimming."

Orson, fourteen, and
Edward, twelve, immediately agreed to a hole-digging expedition. They
found shovels in the tool shed. They made shallow holes to begin
with, but that didn't seem satisfactory to Cruise. "Let's dig
them deep enough we can squat in them and then cover each other up to
the necks!"

That suggestion was
happily adopted. The holes grew deeper. The earth around them cooled
the air by several degrees as they stood in the holes throwing out
dirt over their shoulders into huge piles.

"I'll bury you two
first," Cruise offered. His brothers hunched themselves into the
holes and laughed uproariously while Cruise shoveled the dirt on top
of them. When nothing but their heads were above ground, Cruise
squatted and asked what it was like. "Isn't that cool? Like
being in a 'frigerator, ain't it? Wasn't I right?"

Orson and Edward both
agreed it was indeed cool to their hot, sunburned skins. It was
super-duper. It was swell.

"Here, y'all bury
me." Cruise hurriedly dug his brothers out until they could
wriggle free and pull themselves from the holes, dirt falling from
their pockets and around the waists of their pants.

Cruise couldn't wait.
His skin felt oven-heated. Sticky sweat fell from his forehead into
his eyes. Sweat ran into his ears and slipped snakelike down the back
of his neck. He jumped into the hole and gestured for his brothers to
cover him over. Orson and Edward had him half-buried before Cruise
saw the exchange of sly looks. By then it was too late. "What's
up?" he asked. "Don't do anything mean, okay? I didn't hurt
y'all none. And it was my idea. Wasn't it my idea?"

He was trying to get
out of the hole, worried about the shared look between his brothers,
but they were working faster now, filling in the dirt quicker than he
could find a purchase out. "C'mon, y'all, I changed my mind. I
don't wanna be buried."

"Well you
are
buried, so there," Orson said. He scooped dirt around Cruise's
thin neck, then stepped near enough to make his brother flinch. He
grinned evilly, foot held in the air before he lowered it to tamp the
dirt down with his bare feet.

The pressure set in on
Cruise's chest. He thought maybe he wasn't going to be able to
breathe. "I want
out
now!"

"Not yet, Herod.
We got a surprise for you." Orson snapped his fingers at Edward.
Edward ran from Cruise's restricted field of vision.

"Where's he
going?" Cruise wanted to know. He felt cooled off, that's for
sure. Felt his blood congealing. He was nine. His older brothers
often played cruel tricks on him. He knew this was going to be one of
those times. He just hoped they wouldn't bury his head. One more
shovelful and he'd be underground completely. They'd dark the hot,
hateful sun from his eyes for good.

Cruise heard his
destiny before he saw it. "It's the lawn mower!" he
screamed. He heard the
clackedy-clack-clack
of the push mower
as the blades rolled over the ground in his direction.

"Yeah! We're gonna
mow down your head." Orson looked fit to be tied. He jiggled on
his tiptoes and waved his arms for Edward to hurry.

Lannie came out the
back and saw in a glance what was happening. "You boys quit it
right now. Put up that lawn mower before someone gets hurt."

"Somebody's gonna
get hurt! And it ain't us," Edward squealed, bringing the mower
around so that Cruise could see it.

Cruise's vision, ground
level, gave him an impeccable view of the sharpened blades of the
push mower. They sat still now, gleaming, bits of cut grass clinging
along the curved metal surfaces.

Sweat rolled down and
stung Cruise's wide eyes. A grasshopper flopped onto his forehead and
he had to shake vigorously to make it hop off again. "Make 'em
stop, Lannie, make 'em stop!"

"Edward, get away
from there," she called.

Edward and Orson looked
over their shoulders to see their sister coming down the back steps,
furious red spots on her pale cheeks.

"Oh, you don't let
us ever have any fun," Orson said.

He ran to Edward,
pushed him over a little so they could both hold on to the mower's
push handle. They glared down at Cruise, demented and determined.

"Scared, huh?
Remember the slivers of soap you put in our soup last week? Remember
that squashed frog you put in Edward's bed?"

"Stop it, stop it,
stop it!"

"Let's back up to
get a running start," Orson said.

The two boys quickly
backed away until they were near the rear of the house. They were
making the sounds of revving motors. "Varrooommm. Varrooommm!
VAARROOMM!"

Lannie was running now,
trying to reach them.

Cruise saw it all in
slow-motion agony. Lannie coming into his peripheral vision, her feet
slapping the ground. Edward and Orson pushing down hard on the mower
handle, the blades whirring, chopping, the grass flying from the rear
to cover his brothers' feet. He could already feel the crunch and
explosion of the blades hitting him square in the face. He struggled
mightily. He jerked his shoulders, clawed at the dirt with both
hands, tried turning his torso this way and that to get free of the
prison of earth. He arched his neck, the tendons tight with his long
drawn out scream.

That's when he woke
sweating and brushing at his arms in Lannie's bed during the twilight
hours.

His heart knocked madly
against his rib cage. His mouth was open in a silent scream of
terror. In the darkness of the bedroom he thought he saw his brothers
bearing down on him with the killer machine. Then there was a snap in
the air and he was sucking in rapid breaths, his head between his
hands.

Lannie saved him that
time. He never knew if Edward and Orson really would have tried to
mow down his head as if it were a fat watermelon. She stopped them
inches from his paralyzed face, the blades halting magically. Cruise
fainted that day. He didn't wake until they had him dug from the
hole, and he was lying on his back on the green, freshly mowed grass.
The sun scorched his eyes. He thought he might be dead. He had hated
the sun from that day forward. His tortures happened in the daylight.
People left him alone at night.

Lannie had to help him
walk into the house and bathe. His bladder had loosened in his fright
and there was mud on his legs. He could have told his father and
gotten his brothers beaten for their stunt, but he never told and
neither did Lannie. It was an unspoken code between the children that
tattling was
verboten
. They were punished enough. They
wouldn't bring down extra wrath on one another's heads for any
reason.

Cruise wondered why
he'd had that particular nightmare tonight. He might have had the
lawn mower dream ten times in his whole adult life. It always left
him so tight he thought he might burst from his skin. He wanted out.
Out of the hole and away from the danger. Out of harm's way. Out of
the family that drove him crazy in the beginning.

He came onto his feet
unsteadily and felt his way in the dark to Lannie's bathroom that was
connected by a door to her bedroom. He left the light off, urinated
into the toilet. In the bedroom again, he sat on the side of the bed
trembling.

Had to do it. Had to
release the pressure, the anxieties. Might kill everyone in the house
if he didn't.

He reached beneath his
long hair for the knife. He held it in his right hand and turned over
his left hand until the palm was up and the wrist and inside of his
arm was available to the blade. He was thinking of nothing but
finding relief. All his nerve ends screamed for it. He sat making
short decisive cuts in the skin between wrist and elbow. He switched
the knife to his left hand and began operating on his right arm the
same way. Blood oozed from the cuts and dripped onto Lannie's sheets.

It was the first time
he had ever done this. He thought that it helped immensely. The
feeling of tightness escaped through the slits in his flesh like air
seeping from a bicycle tire. He wouldn't die; he hadn't cut into the
veins or arteries. He wouldn't get infected; he knew how to disinfect
the cuts and bind them.

He just
felt better.

He'd have to remember
this remedy when his fears and his anxieties grew impossible to bear.

For a while he wouldn't
have to kill anyone, though if he hadn't already dispatched Edward
and Orson to their deserved rewards, he would find them right now and
take off their heads again. In a slower, more torturous way.

Just the way they'd
tried to take his. The scummy bastards.

#

8:l5 P.M. Cruise stood
next to Molly in the open door. They were ready to leave. He had to
move her by holding on to her arm. Her wrists were too badly burned
by the ropes for him to touch without her crying out loud.

Lannie's children
milled around getting in the way. Lannie had the baby in her arms.
Her hair fell over one eye and she squinted from her glasses. She
looked tired. Haunted. What right did she have? She just took care of
a bunch of rug rats and his father. She didn't really have anything
to complain about. He gave her money to help out on the bills. She
didn't have to look so bad if she'd wash and roll her hair, put on
some unwrinkled clothes that weren't so stained with baby shit and
throw up.

"Thanks, Lannie.
Tell Daddy I'll be back," he said.

Lannie shrugged.

"I know he'll
forget. Tell him anyway."

"All right."
She shifted the baby onto her opposite hip bone, shook the hair from
her eyes. Cruise saw she wasn't wearing a bra beneath her shirt. Her
breasts sagged like pennies in a sock.

"Remember what I
told you," Molly said to Lannie as he hustled her outside.

Cruise put her into the
Chrysler and slammed the car door. He didn't care what she told
Lannie. Wouldn't do her any good. Lannie'd never turn him in. He
waved good-bye to his sister.

Flagstaff at night was
a dead town. All the stores were closed down. Not many drivers on the
streets. He filled up the gas tank at an all-night service station,
checked the oil and water and tires. Doing these chores he kept a
careful watch on Molly. She never moved from the front seat. She
didn't even glance toward the cement box where the station attendant
sat in a metal folding chair reading a muscle magazine.