Sleeping Policemen (9 page)

He swallowed. “No, I don't think so.”

“Let's hold off,” Finney said. “Lay low for a while.”

And suddenly it occurred to Nick to wonder why he had never met the Senator—if the man even knew he existed. He flushed, stared down at brown weave of winter grass, stricken with a voice out of the past, Sue's voice.
This is my
friend
Nick
. The word rankled. Friend.

He spoke, mostly to quiet his mind: “You think it'll blow over?”

“Look. We've got three days of classes left, a week of exams, four weeks of Christmas break. By the time we come back, this is all ancient history. Who knows? Tuck may even lay out a semester. No way he's graduating in the spring.”

“And if Evans comes sniffing around again?”

“We deal with it, calmly. He's got nothing.”

But Finney hadn't seen that cockroach scuttle across his wall, had he? Or that hand, nightmarish quick. Nick certainly hadn't told him about it. He and Sue hadn't even talked about it. Maybe they couldn't, couldn't find the words to wrap around it. It was too much like a glimpse into a parallel universe, too senseless, crazy. He remembered the stack of Superman comics in the corner of the bedroom his brothers had shared. The Bizarro world. Christ, what could you say about something like that?

When he looked up, Finney was staring at him. His eyes sparkled in the sun. “I'll sit on Tuck, you keep Sue in hand.”

Nick stood, glancing at his watch. Almost 1:30. Modern Poetry was shot. He turned to leave, shrugging into the straps of his book bag. He hesitated, then asked, turning to face Finney, “You think about the girl, about Casey?”

Finney looked at the ground. At first Nick thought he wasn't going to answer, then he said, his voice quiet, “Every time I close my eyes I see her.
Hear
her.”

Nick felt something move between them, tightening, the accident binding them together like a wet leather strap. Unconsciously, he lifted his hand and tapped the videotape.

“Get rid of that tape.” Finney stood. “You realize it's just us, don't you, Nicky? If either of us loses it, we all lose. We stay calm, think clearly, we can ride this thing out. Right, Nicky? But it's me and you—no one else.” Finney's words bounced among the four walls, disappearing slowly into the void of the sky. They carried the same dead tone as the grunts and groans in the cinderblock room.

“Don't call me Nicky,” he said, already walking away.

Monday, 1:45 to 11:43 PM

From the moment he arrived in Ransom, Nick had loved the library, a nineteenth-century sprawl of gables and wings that looked more like a refugee from a gothic novel than the academic haunt of svelte co-eds with Greek pins and lacquered hair. He loved everything about the place: the checkered expanses of black and white tile; the hushed intensity of study, like a big, silent dog straining at its leash; even the dusty odor of the books, about the most alien smell he could have imagined as a boy in Glory. Now he stood in the entrance hall for a moment, just letting the tension flow out of him as Finney's voice—

—
we can ride this thing out
—

—slipped away into the silence.

He shrugged his book bag off his shoulders as he crossed the lobby. Beyond a bank of glass doors, the reference room lay forsaken, students and professors alike drawing a last breath before the final, hectic commotion of exams. For the next night or two the campus would rock with keg parties, but Nick's taste for barley and hops had evaporated on that stretch of mountain highway. Unbidden, his fingers brushed his jacket, the roll of bills and the videotape hidden within.

For half a second he hesitated, and then he remembered Tuck's fear-uglied voice—

—
save me that three musketeer shit, Nick
—

—and a piece of his dad's advice came back to him.
You got to take care of number one
, he had said, one blunt finger prodding at Nick's chest.
You got to take care of yourself or they'll screw you and leave you crippled in a chair
. He had never said who he meant by “they,” but then he didn't really have to. “They” were all the people who got men like Frank Laymon by the short hairs, the landlords and bosses, the creditors and corporate lawyers who had hamstrung his worker's comp claims, leaving him half a lifetime to nurse his hatred for them. Suits, he called them, the faceless men who had sentenced him to a paltry disability stipend and a life term in the sagging clapboard house where he would never again climb the stairs.

Sighing, Nick dropped his book bag and sat down in front of a computer. He dug the flyer out of his shirt pocket and spread it open on the table, smoothing the crinkles with trembling fingers. Casey Nicole Barrett stared up at him from some lost moment of joy, and suddenly Nick was glad he hadn't made it to Modern Poetry.

Stillman, the instructor, was the diametrical opposite of Gillespie: a youngish guy, a decade removed from grad school and steeped in the victim-chic ideology of his day. His class was less about literature than sociology—oppressed ethnic minorities and their oppressors, dead white males mostly, though Nick figured oppression had less to do with race and gender than with money, the only true equalizer. Stillman's favorite question, usually rendered with a sympathetic twist of his bovine physiognomy, was, “How did this poem make you
feel
?” Ransom tradition had it that a legendary English major of years past, a guy named Wohlpart, had responded to this earnest question one morning with a table-shivering, beer-fueled fart, but Nick had his doubts about the veracity of this story.

Still, the question rankled and never more so than now, as he stared down into Casey Nicole Barrett's dead face.

How does this make you feel
? Stillman inquired inside his head, and Nick grimaced, knowing that even if he lived a hundred years, he would never feel any worse.

He reached for the mouse to open Google, and typed in a name to start a search: Alfred Reynolds Barrett.

“So did you get rid of it?” Sue asked.

Blushing, Nick darted a glance across the table at her, feeling trapped, the way he had felt when he was a kid, when Jake and Sam had discovered the cache of skin magazines he'd stashed in his closet. The shame of the moment—his brothers teasing him,
Hey, Nicky, you all grown up now, you beatin the meat
?—came rushing back. He hadn't been able to meet their mocking gazes, and now he couldn't meet Sue's, forthright, as though she were asking something she already knew the answer to. Maybe she did. Sue had a sense about things like that. She wasn't shy behind closed doors. Nick could attest to that.

Not that you could tell by looking at her. She had met him at the door of her apartment, clad in a pair of his cast-off sweats and an LSU sweatshirt, her copper hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked like a high-school girl, her face scrubbed and open. Innocent. Nick had dumped his book bag in the foyer, hastily ditching his coat beside it as she slipped into his arms.

And it wasn't the money, either. He hadn't wanted her to know that he had the tape still, there in his jacket pocket—that he couldn't make himself destroy it, that he kept fingering it, like a miser's gold.

“C'mon,” she had said, leading him into the kitchen.

Pots boiled and simmered there, pasta and some kind of white sauce with fresh peppers and white chunks of chicken cooked in oil, a fresh salad. Savory aromas drifted in the air.

“I've been Krogering.”

“So I see.”

She turned to him with wine, a pale shimmer in a crystal goblet. She had the bottle in an ice-bucket on the counter. Nick thought that was kind of stupid—the refrigerator was right there—but endearing at the same time. Sue had already had a glass or two, he could tell. A flush pinked her cheeks and the faintest hint of old Savannah had crept into her voice. Watching her, Nick felt something tighten inside his chest, something he couldn't quite put into words. He caught her as she leaned over to stir the sauce.

“Hey!” she protested, but he could tell she didn't mean it. He tasted the wine when he kissed her, and when he broke the kiss he gazed for a moment into those green eyes. He felt like he could drown there, the green depths of the Gulf rising up to claim him.

“I've been thinking about after we graduate,” he said. “About graduate school.”

“It's hard waiting to hear back, isn't it?”

“I was thinking more about what you were going to do.”

She didn't say anything, just stared at him. Waiting.

“I was thinking maybe you could come with me. Now that I have the money.”

“It's only ten thousand dollars,” she said, blind to how much money that was to him. “Not even that.”

“Yeah, but if there was more—”

“More? There isn't more.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It's that tape, isn't it? Is that what you're thinking?” She paused. “I thought you were supposed to get rid of it.”

“I did—”

“Did you?” Perhaps she saw the answer in his face. “Are you crazy, Nick? You have to get rid of it, don't you see that?”

“sue—”

“You killed a man, Nick!”

She stepped back and the words hung between them, almost visible in the silence. He could feel her drawing away from him, that tectonic shift of fear and desire, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than a lifeline to fling across the abyss he felt opening between them.

“Sue …”

“Oh, Nick, let's just pretend everything is okay for tonight.” They stood there a moment longer, frozen in time, and then she reached up to touch his face. “Come on,” she whispered, her voice almost gentle, “the sauce is going to burn.” And then she was gone.

That was the end of it. Everything since had been banter and wine. They opened a second bottle when they sat down to eat—it stood empty on the table between them now—and when she said those words—

—
So did you get rid of it
?—

—reopening the wound before it even had time to scab over, he felt the alcohol buzzing through him, blurring the lines between the things he had to say and the things he did not dare. He felt disembodied, tethered to his own flesh by the most tenuous of threads.

“You didn't, did you?”

“Not yet.”

And then she surprised him—like a kid again, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the carnival rides, by the gorilla behind the bars. Maybe the wine emboldened her.

“I was afraid you had,” she said.

That was how they ended up watching the tape again, he and Sue in the dark living room of her apartment with leftovers congealing on the table and the wine working in their blood. Sue's eyes were shiny when Nick glanced over at her, her tongue moistening her lips, and suddenly Nick wanted to cry.

On the tape, though, nothing had changed.

Nothing at all.

Halfway through the third bottle of wine, the clear borders of Nick's world started to collapse. Shadows edged his field of vision. He watched the television through a shifting penumbra of darkness, capable of wrenching his attention away only for seconds at a time, for stolen glimpses of Sue, her face flushed, swollen-looking, her eyes wild as she gazed transfixed into the flickering screen. After that, it seemed like he wasn't fully there, as though he were watching events unfold on a wavering video-feed with a ten-second delay, a NASA broadcast ten million miles from the world he had known.

He couldn't say when Sue's sweatshirt came off, when the still length of her body against his quickened, her tongue probing at his mouth. He didn't care, either, glad only to have her in his arms, her flesh chill and blue in the flickering radiance of the screen, the molten gash between her legs like a wound.

She slung one pale leg across him, her fingers fumbling to release the zipper of his jeans. When he slipped inside her, he felt as if he had been caught in a slow, relentless current, tidal, self-obliterating. He could go forever, wine-numb, truncheon-thick with desire.

Time blurred, an alcohol-fuzzed flicker of slick union set to the ghostly dance of the screen, those eerie grunts and groans. Abruptly, he found himself standing naked in front of the television, cradling a glass of wine while Sue watched from the sofa.

The whirring VCR snapped to a stop. Dimly, he recalled a crisis just past, a lost remote, a mission. He knelt to punch play, wine sloshing across his hand and forearm. As the title flickered up on the black screen and that porous field of gray took shape, he turned to meet Sue's eyes.

“C'mere,” she whispered.

Crossing the room, Nick felt like an astronaut loping across a barren moonscape, each step a slow-motion odyssey of drunken precision.

Sue stood to meet him, to pry the wine-glass from his hand. The dregs were cool as she splashed them across his belly. And then she knelt before him, working there, her mouth deliberate, and sweet.

Nick Laymon groaned.

On her knees before him, she turned to study the screen. Then she looked up to meet his gaze, her eyes hooded, heavy.

“Hit me,” she whispered.

“What—”

“Hit me.”

For a moment, Nick was back in the strip club, the curtain twitching aside, that hand lashing out as the lap dancer stumbled back. That grin.

Sue leaned forward, her tongue working.

“Hit me.”

Of its own accord, against his conscious will, his hand leapt out. The sound of it was startling. She lifted her head, red hair in her face. “Hit me.”

He groaned. “No, Sue—”

But the hand leapt out, a striking and a reining back—

—
No!
—

—in the same swift motion.

The blow spun her to the coffee table, face to the screen, her bottom upturned. And now, without thinking—

—
that grin
—

—he was on her. He grasped her wrists, twisted them behind her, cuffed them in one hand. With the other, he guided himself into her from behind.