Talk Talk (28 page)

“Almost done?” Bridger signed. His face was soft, open, and she could have read his expression as loving and supportive, but he wasn't fooling her. This was a guilty look, edged with alarm, a look complicit with her mother's--they “had” heard. An irrational anger started up in her: her own lover, her own mother.

“Yes,” she said. “Or no, not really. I'm just getting nowhere, that's all. Spinning my wheels, right?” And what was that, a racing term? Or was it when you were stuck in the snow or the mud? “Why, what's the plan?”

Her mother had taken to Bridger in a way Dana would have found gratifying under other circumstances, making it her sworn duty to show him every tourist site in the city, from the Statue of Liberty to MoMA to the American Indian Museum, Ground Zero and Grant's Tomb. She'd even taken him on the Circle Line tour around the Battery and up the East River, through the lively corrugations of Spuyten Duyvil and back down the Hudson on the West Side while Dana was--ostensibly--working. Her mother's smile strained till it blew up in her face. “I don't know,” she said, “we were just thinking we might go to a matinee, something light--a musical, maybe. Bridger's never been to a show and it would be a shame if he--”

“We don't have to go,” he said, slumping his shoulders and fixing his smile, and of course what he meant was that they did have to go or he would never get over it. “Can you handle it?”

“What do you mean 'can I handle it'? It's not a revival of “Children of a Lesser God,” is it?”

They both laughed. But these were strained laughs--she could tell by the way their eyes flashed at each other like those kissing fish in an aquarium. “We were thinking maybe “The Lion King,”” he said. “Or “Rent,” if we can get into it.”

““Equus,”” she said. “What about “Equus?”” She was being cruel, but she couldn't help herself. She was remembering the first time she'd ever seen the National Theater of the Deaf, when she was a freshman at Gallaudet, the year Deaf Power came into its own and swept the university. For the first time in Gallaudet's history, all the way back to its founding in 1864, a deaf president was installed after the entire student body took to the streets to protest the naming of yet another hearing chief executive. They marched in the streets for a week, chanting “Down with Paternalism!” and “We Are Not Children!”

“No More Daddies,” they shouted, “No More Mommies!” The wind stung her eyes. The cops came on their silent shuddering horses. She'd never felt more caught up and passionate in her life. And when the curtain opened on the play on that final night, the night of their triumph, the house was full to the rafters and she had to find a seat on the floor, everyone holding their breath in anticipation. It took her a moment to understand: this was no parade of mimes, no revival of “Death of a Salesman” or “The Glass Menagerie” in dumb show, but a new play, commissioned and written in their own language, the language of their new president. She exchanged a look with the girl sitting next to her, her roommate, Sarah, whose eyes flew back to the stage while her hands lay motionless in her lap, and she began to breathe again.

And now they wanted her to sit through “The Lion King?”

“No,” she said, “I think I'll just stay here and kill myself instead.”

“Come on,” Bridger said, and when he put a hand on her shoulder and ran it up the back of her neck, she pulled away from him. “It'll be fun.”

“You go,” she said.

Her mother's face hovered over her. “Lunch?” she offered. “Why don't we all just go to lunch then? What do you say?”

“No, really,” she said. “You go.”

On the day they picked up the car, the day she planned to sign over the insurance check to the man in the garage, retrieve her keys and then, no matter what Bridger or her mother or anyone else might have to say about it, go directly to Peck Wilson's house in the hope of spotting the Mercedes there in the driveway, the sun seemed to rise right up out of the front room of her mother's apartment, already riding high and scorching the earth by the time she and Bridger arrived, on foot and sweating, at Grand Central. Bridger had talked her into walking--for the exercise, of course, but there was no reason to be wasting money on cab fare when neither of them had a job and their credit was mutually shot. She bought three plastic bottles of water in the one-liter size while Bridger saw to the bagels in the brown paper bag and picked up the “Times” and the “Daily News” and then they settled into the Metro North car like reverse commuters. The other passengers looked bored and enervated, nobody talking, and that pleased her in an odd way, their silence layered over hers. She was imagining the other sounds--the rattling of the undercarriage, the hiss of the automatic doors--when Bridger tapped her on the arm and asked for one of the bottles of water.

She watched him unscrew the plastic cap and hold the bottle to his lips until he had to come up for air. The sweat stood out on his upper lip and his hair had thickened with it. “It's hot,” he mouthed. “Wow, it's hot.” He handed her half a bagel, neatly sliced in two. Outside, beyond the moving windows, the river looked as if it had just been refilled with pure clean tap water instead of the usual gray-green bilge. “You know those pictures of--?” he said, but she didn't catch the end of it. A place name, long word.

“What?”

“Afghanistan,” he said, spelling it out. “From the war, like, when was it--couple of years ago? Did you notice that every mujahedin carried three things into battle with him--a Kalashnikov rifle, a rocket launcher and a liter bottle of Evian, just like this?”

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, it was funny. Just goes to show you what you value when you have nothing.”

“Right, you have nothing, no water, no trees, nothing but rocks. That's why you bomb the World Trade Center. That's why you carry weapons--so you can take what you want.”

“Like Peck Wilson.”

He gave her a look. The train lurched over a bad section of track, jolting the bagel he'd been gesturing with. She watched it float up against the backdrop of the Hudson, tightly clamped in the grip of his floating fingers. “I guess,” he said. “Yeah.”

“Do you think he has a gun?”

He shrugged. “He's an ex-con, isn't that what Frank Calabrese said?”

“So yes?”

“Which is all the more reason to stay away from him. I mean, look what it's got you, what it's got us--ruined credit, running all over the country, no money, no job, and now your car.”

“But we are going to drive by, right? Or maybe park around the block and just walk by in case he recognizes my car”--he was saying something but she wasn't watching--“just walk, that's all. And if we see him, or the car--the car would be the key--we call the police.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. They've been real friendly and understanding, haven't they?”

She felt that burr of irritation again, couldn't help herself. She made an effort to control her voice, breathe in, breathe out. “I'm not giving up,” she said, and she had no idea what she sounded like. “Not now. Not when we're this close.”

It took him a minute. He turned his head to gaze out on the river and the distant fractured cliffs of the Palisades, then swung back to her, his eyes compact and hard. “That's all we're going to do,” he said. “Just walk.”

It was quarter past eleven when they arrived at the Peterskill station and it must have been a hundred already, or close to it. Bridger wanted to walk to the garage--“It's only like a mile,” he said, and she said, “No, it's more like two, two and a half.” The station was right on the water, but there was no breeze and the sun ricocheted up into their faces. Cars pulled in and out of the lot, moving with slow deliberation, their windshields glazed with light. A knot of people crept past them with their shoulders slumped, borne down under the weight of the heat and trailing suitcases and elastic children. To make it worse, something was rotten, something dead along the shore, and the reek of it was calibrated to a persistent smell of frying from the cafe adjoining the depot. For a long moment they both just stood there glaring at each other until finally she said, “We're taking a cab and I'm not going to argue about it.” And she couldn't help adding a little sting to it. “It's my money, anyway.”

At the garage, everybody was moving in slow motion, from the mechanics to the service manager who went over the bill with them to the secretary who typed it up and had Dana sign here and here and here. She and Bridger made a show of looking over the car, which had just come back from the body shop that very morning, and she wondered about a ripple effect in the paint you could only see in a certain light and from a certain angle, but the service manager assured her that there was nothing wrong and even produced a pristine high-quality cotton-fiber rag and buffed it for her. “You see?” he said. “What'd I tell you?” And while she watched his lips and face and understood what he was saying, she couldn't see any appreciable difference--the ripples were still there. But it was hot. Mortally hot. And she didn't say anything.

Bridger kept telling her to make sure everything felt right with the rear end and she put it in reverse and jerked back a few feet, nearly running over the once-white dog that lay comatose in the shade of the retaining wall, and then she was out on the street, feeling liberated. She had her car back. She was mobile. She could go anywhere she wanted, up the coast to Maine or back across the country to San Roque, or even down to Gallaudet, to show Bridger the campus where she'd spent something like nine years of her life. Or to that street where the moving van was, or had been--Peck Wilson's street.

Bridger poked her. “How does it feel?”

“Fine.” It was a car--how should she know how it felt? It negotiated the bumps and potholes, responded to the pressure of her hands on the wheel, took her where she wanted to go.

“It's not pulling, is it?”

She didn't answer. There was hardly any traffic, a dead town on a dead day--a Saturday--and she was looking for a stretch of road where she could open it up a bit, feel the breeze tear through the windows and take hold of her hair, but there were just city streets and hills and stoplights. “You feel like lunch?” she asked, turning to him. “Before we--before we take our little walk? Our little stroll? Hmm? Lunch? Does that sound good?”

They found a diner in the middle of town, a real authentic one--“echt,” wasn't that the word?--fashioned from an old railway car, and sat there in the stultifying heat with their clothes sticking to the leather-backed seats while they ordered sandwiches they barely touched and downed glass after glass of pre-sweetened iced tea. Both doors were open and an old upright fan was going in the corner. There were flies everywhere, legions of them gang-piling on the window ledges and drifting haplessly in and out the doors. She'd ordered tuna on rye, not the best choice for a tropical day in a place where the refrigeration might be suspect, which was why Bridger had said, “I'm sticking with the bacon on a hard roll,” but it wasn't bad--it was good, even. And when the waitress, big in the hips, cheery and efficient, brought her face into view and asked, “What's the matter, honey, is everything all right or is it just the heat?,” she smiled and said, “lust the heat.”

In fact, she was feeling good. Feeling lucky. This was the day, she knew it, and in the cramped cubicle of the ladies' that was no bigger than a shower stall, she reapplied her lipstick in the scratched-over mirror and gave herself a big relaxed smile, a beautiful smile, the smile her mother always said would be the making of her--“With that smile,” she'd say, “with that face, you'll go anywhere,” as if a smile could make up for her fried cochlea or disarm the stranger who looked at her as if she'd been just let out of the zoo. But here it was, her beautiful smile, consummate and full-lipped, staring back at her from the mirror, the very smile she was going to lay on Peck Wilson when they were leading him away in chains.

They didn't want to risk driving by the house, so she took a parallel street and found a spot to park under a big over-spreading maple in a long row of them. Bridger climbed out of the car and stretched as if they'd been driving for hours instead of minutes. He was wearing a T-shirt from one of the Kade films, red on black, featuring the hero's outsized head in some sort of leather helmet, and though The Kade was meant to look menacing she found the representation faintly ridiculous. He looked constipated. Looked weak and old and at the mercy of his agents. “Nice T-shirt,” she said. “Did I tell you how much I love it?”

He grinned from over the roof of the car. “Yeah,” he said. “You did. But The Kade is my man, you know that. If it weren't for him Radko'd probably be out of business by now.”

“I hear you,” she said, and they both laughed. She was wearing a T-shirt herself, also black, emblazoned with the name of a band she liked. Or would like to like. And a pair of shorts, loose-fit but not nearly as baggy as Bridger's. Despite the heat she had on her running shoes--or better yet, walking shoes. Her first impulse that morning was to go with something open-toed, sandals, flip-flops, but she'd caught herself: you never knew what the day would bring or just how involved this little stroll was going to turn out to be. The thought of it, coming back to her now as she tucked her purse under the seat and locked the car door, made her stomach clench. “You have your cell?” she asked.

Bridger whipped it from his pocket and held it aloft.

“Okay,” she said, “then I guess we're ready.”

The houses here weren't as dominating as the peeling Victorians closer to the center of town, but they seemed to be from the same general period--they were just scaled down, as if the people with more modest incomes had wound up here while the brewers and factory owners and bankers expressed themselves more grandly. And conveniently. Or maybe she was all wrong. She didn't know much about architecture, and she would have been the first to admit it. But certainly generations upon generations had lived here, unlike in California, and she could see that reflected in the grim stature of most of the houses, gray and nondescript but still standing after all these years.

They turned right at the corner and there, at the far end of the block, was Peck Wilson's street--what was it called again? Division? Division Street? That was fitting, wasn't it? Or how about Jailhouse Road? Thieves' Alley? Hadn't she seen a street on the map called Gallows Hill Road? That's where he should have lived, the son of a bitch, Gallows Hill Road. She was going to mention that to Bridger, lighten his mood, but she saw that his eyes were fixed on the corner ahead and he'd unconsciously quickened his stride. She skipped a couple of steps to catch up to him, then took hold of his hand and squeezed it hard and moved in to match him stride for stride.