Talk Talk (29 page)
A car went up the street and turned at the corner, leaving a taint of exhaust heavy on the air. Two kids on bicycles chased each other up the opposite sidewalk. The leaves of the trees curled in on themselves. And then they were on the street itself, Peck Wilson's street--an abrupt right at the corner and there was the house where the U-Haul had been parked, and there, across the street and half a dozen houses down, partially obscured by the shrubs and trees and the line of cars parked along the curb, was the house they'd come to visit. She felt Bridger tense at her side, both of them straining to see as they strolled hand in hand up the walk, each step bringing them closer. Bridger stripped off his sunglasses--Peck Wilson's sunglasses--as if to see better. They were directly across from the house now, trying to act casual, but there was nothing to see as far as she could tell.
“What do you think?” Bridger said.
They were still walking, moving past the house and heading for the end of the block, the sun lying in stripes across the sidewalk ahead of them, somebody's sprinkler going, a dog showing its teeth from behind a rusted iron fence. “I don't know,” she said, feeling all the air go out of her, “it looks closed up to me.”
He had his shoulders thrown back, his head cocked in a way she recognized: he was agitated, keyed up, almost twitching with all that testosterone charging through him. She remembered a lecture she'd attended in college--an animal behaviorist, a woman who'd worked with the chimps of Gombe and the bonobos in the Congo, showed a film of the males working themselves up in threat display, and all the students, all of her deaf compatriots, had burst into laughter. They didn't need to go to Africa to study body language--they saw it every minute of every day.
“Yeah, but all these houses look closed up,” he said, bringing his face so near she could smell the residue of the bacon on his breath, “because everybody's just hunkered down in front of the TV with the air conditioner going full blast. We need to”--but she missed the rest of it because they were crossing the street at the corner now, nice and square, nice and rectilinear, up on the far sidewalk and swing left, the cars idling at the light with their windows rolled up and their own air conditioners delivering the goods. The heat rose up off the pavement and hit her in the face as if she were walking through a wall and letting it crumble round her.
And then everything suddenly speeded up, fast forward to the end, the sun, the trees, the sidewalks and cars all dissolving in a blur that crystallized in the rear bumper of a wine-red Mercedes shooting past them, the right turn blinker on and a little girl's limp doll pressed to the window in back.
HE WAS SO BOUND UP in the moment, so intent on the faces at the open door and hyper-aware of Natalia preening and swelling at his side, so busy struggling with the stuffed toy and the candy and the flowers and fumbling toward the semi-coherent murmur of the half-formed phrases on his lips, that he didn't see it coming. Didn't look over his shoulder. Didn't clear his sight lines. Didn't watch his back. “Hi, honey,” he was going to say, “remember me?” And would she come to him? Would her face open up the way it used to when he was the heart and soul and dead glowing center of her universe or was she going to freeze him out? And his mother. His mother with her new haircut and big swaying gauzy blouse that bunched at her hips and gave way to the trailing skirt and the pipestems of her legs. “Hi, Mom,” he was going to say, “this is Natalia. My fiancée. My fiancée, Natalia.” And Natalia would be giving Sukie the fish eye, putting two and two together, working herself up over her own daughter's exile at that overpriced camp at the end of the dirt road that left a tattered blanket of dust clinging to the car every day and yet drawing all her strings tight to make a good impression in front of his mother and still riding high on the current of those three soaring syllables, “fiancée.” There was all that. All that and the heat too.
He'd just shifted the toy from his right arm to his left--it was ridiculous, the biggest thing in the store, a life-size stuffed replica of a sled dog, replete with the blue glass buttons of its eyes--to take hold of Natalia's hand and lead her up the walk, when there was another face there, two faces, hovering suddenly at the margin of his peripheral vision. His and hers. He cut his eyes right and there was a single lost beat in there somewhere before he felt the shock knife through him. It was as if he were fen years old all over again, thrilling to his first slasher flick, no children under sixteen allowed without parent or guardian, the theater gone silent, the maniac loose--and then the scream, stark, universal, collaborative. Rising.
The stuffed dog fell to the ground. He let go of Natalia's hand even as she said, “What, what is it?” and turned to follow his eyes and see them there sprung up out of the concrete walk not twenty feet away like figures out of a dream, a bad dream, terminally bad, the worst, and though he was cool, always cool--Peck Wilson, never ruffled, never at a loss, never weak--he couldn't help himself now.
He didn't stop to think how they'd come to track him here, how they were like parasites, how they wouldn't let go and could never learn no matter how many times he taught them, because this moment was beyond thought or resentment or fear, a moment that broke loose inside of him in a sudden ejaculation of violence. Ten steps, too quick to blink, the heart of the panther his tae kwon do instructor always talked about beating now in place of his own, his hands doing their thing independent of his will, perfect balance, and the fool was actually coming to him, flailing his arms like a fairy. And cursing--“you motherfucker” and the like--as if he had breath to waste. The first blow--the “sonnal mok anchigi,” knifehand strike to the neck--rocked him, and then two quick chops to drop his arms, ride back on the left foot and punch through the windpipe with the right.
Somebody screamed. The heat ran at him, all-encompassing, a sea of heat at flood tide. Another scream. It wasn't Natalia screaming, it wasn't his mother or Sukie either. This was like nothing he'd ever heard, ugly, just ugly. And there was the bitch emitting it, right there watching Bridger Martin jerk on the grass and clutch at his own throat as if he wanted to throttle himself, two quick kicks to the ribs to make it easier on him, and it was just the two of them now. Just him and Dana Halter, in her shorts and T-shirt, her face twisted with the insoluble conundrum of that unholy voice wedded to that hard moment. And then, as if it had all been decided beforehand, he went for her and she dodged away and they were both running.
There was nothing in his mind but to lash out, hurt her, bring her low, crush her, and he almost had her in the first furious rush, a snatch at her trailing arm and the fine articulated bones of her flashing wrist, but she was too quick for him, and the fury of his failure--“the bitch, the bitch, the relentless bitch”--burst behind his eyes in a pulse of irradiated heat so that he was blind to everything but the tan soles of her pumping shoes and the fan of her retreating hair. He burned, burned. Every cord in his body snapped to attention. He was in shape, good shape, but so was she, running for her life, running to beat him, humiliate him, wear him down, and they'd gone the length of the block and she was still ten feet beyond him.
Up ahead, the light was turning red. He saw it and calculated his chance because she would have to pivot to go left or swing right and cross the street with the green and that would slow her a fraction of a second, just long enough--but she surprised him, hurtling straight through the intersection without even turning her head, and the blue pickup, coming hard, had to swerve to avoid her and he was the one who lost a step, dodging round the rear bumper while the driver cursed and the horn blared. What he should have done, if he'd been thinking, was double back and pack Natalia in the car and make scarce before somebody called the cops, but he wasn't thinking. She was fleeing, he was chasing. He was going to run her down by the end of the next block, that was what he was going to do, run her down and have his sixty seconds with her, payback, and then he'd be gone.
He could hear the torn sheet of her breathing, the slap of her feet pounding at the concrete walk. Her shoulders rocked, her hair jogged as if it had come loose from her scalp. And more: he could smell her, the torched ashes of her fear, the sweat caught under her arms and running like juice between her legs. He gained a step, but the heat rose up to put two hands against his chest and push at him even as he tried to close the gap and slam her to the pavement from behind. Faces drifted by behind the windshields of the cars easing down the street, there was somebody on a porch, the thump of the bass line from a hidden boom-box, voices, music, the buzz of a cicada. The blood shrieked in his ears. He wasn't even winded.
At the next corner, the car--a white Chevy van--was moving too fast, gunning on the yellow to make the light, and the woman at the wheel hit her horn, laid into it, but this was a game of chicken now and he never hesitated. He had her, actually had his hand locked in her hair, the van sliding by like a bull brushing the cape, when the other car, the one he hadn't seen, plunged in on the bumper of the van. That put an end to it. Where there had been nothing but air the strangest sudden act of prestidigitation interposed a plane of steel, chrome and safety glass, and they both hit it and went down to the smell of scorched rubber.
Two black dudes. Young, angry-looking, scared. People had run crazy right into the side of their car, and they were smelling the scorched rubber too, slamming out of both doors while the traffic froze and Dana Halter jumped up like a rabbit and he jumped up too, absolutely capable of anything, “anything.” But then the siren whooped and the lights flashed and the patrol car was right there, sliding in to block off the intersection, and there was nowhere to go. For one instant he stared into her eyes, brown eyes, the black irises dilated with her fear and now her hate and now her triumph, and the cops were getting out of the cruiser, a tight-assed woman in schoolteacher glasses and an old guy, looking grim. Peck just stood there, sweating, trying to catch his breath. His left arm stung where he'd slammed it against the car and his pants were torn at the knee. He could have run, and wound up in jail--or shot. But he didn't. He went deep and he focused and the cool descended like a long sheet of windblown rain because he saw the look on the lady cop's face when she saw Dana, the flash of recognition there, and already one of the black dudes was starting in, overexcited, hysterical, his voice rising up and rising up until you could hear nothing else.
“What's the trouble here?” the lady cop said, ignoring the black guy, looking from Dana to Peck and then settling there, on him. She had both her hands on her belt, as if it weighed more than she did. He knew the type. All bluff. And bullshit.
“I don't know, Officer,” he heard himself say over the jabber of the black dude, “it was this lady”--he indicated Dana--“I think she's crazy or maybe retarded or something? She ran out into the street like she was out of her mind and maybe she was trying to commit suicide, I don't know, and I just tried, well, I grabbed for her, I mean, just out of instinct--”
The bitch cut in now. Her hair was stuck to her face, both her knees scraped and bleeding. She looked the part, looked demented, looked like they'd just let her out of the pyscho ward. She talked too fast, too loud, spinning out something unintelligible. “He, he--” was all he got. She was pointing at him. “Chase me,” she said. “I mean, “chased” me.”
“Crazy lady ran right into the side of my car--they's a dent there in the back door, you can look for yourself, Officer, and, I mean, it's not me. She ran right through the light and she didn't even look one way, I mean, she never even turned her neck--”
“He's a thief,” the bitch said, jerking her arms and stamping her foot in emphasis. “He, he--” and the rest was gone, just gibberish.
The old cop was there now, fumbling with his little pad and tamping his ballpoint pen against his open palm as if it held the key to the situation. Peck waited for him to look up, then glanced from him to the lady cop and shrugged, as if to say, “Hey, she's a mental case, can't you see that? Could it be any clearer? Just listen to her.”
He had maybe sixty seconds, two minutes max, and then there'd be somebody coming up the street from two blocks down, from his mother's house, and he prayed it wouldn't be Natalia, prayed she'd have the sense to get in the car and disappear. He listened as the bitch went on, her voice settling now, getting clearer, and he gave the lady cop an indulgent smile. “Maybe she's on drugs or something,” he said. “I don't know. I'm just a guy on my way down to get the paper--I mean, if she wants to die... And you know something else,” he said, and he pointed at the black dude now, the driver, “this guy was running the red light. Yeah, what about that?”
That stirred the brew. This man--he was in his twenties, wearing a basketball jersey and a doo-rag--was clearly not going to take this kind of shit, and his voice went up an octave and his buddy joined in even as the lady cop focused on the bitch and a whole crowd of people materialized. He saw his chance. Everyone was shouting, even the policewoman, trying to assert herself, apply some order, and he took two steps back and found himself on the fringe of the crowd. Two more steps and he was a bystander. Then he turned his back and ducked down the driveway of the nearest house and went up and over the fence in back, dropped down into the alley and took off running.
He must have gone three or four blocks, the change ringing in his pockets and his lungs on fire, before he slowed to a walk. A walk was better. A walk was just right. Because nobody would have mistaken him for a jogger in his taupe silk suit and checkerboard Vans and if he wasn't a jogger then why was he running? Especially with that siren coming in over the trees like a jet plane on fire and caroming off the windows and spoiling the ball game on the radio? He forced himself to keep it under control, though his heart was banging and he'd sweated right through his clothes and he must have looked like shit with his eyes staring and his pants torn at the knee and his arms swaying as if he was some moron going door to door with magazine subscriptions or vacuum cleaners. But he didn't have a vacuum cleaner or a briefcase or a sheaf of order forms or anything else. Just sweat. And torn pants.
People were sitting on their front stoops or in little patches of yard with their cooking grills and plastic lawn chairs, and what day was it, anyway? Saturday. Cookout, clambake, cold beer in the cooler. Two kids squatted in the shade of a street tree, cupping a cigarette. They both glanced up and gave him a look--they knew who belonged on their block and who didn't--but he just put his head down and kept walking, angling toward the river, one block south, one block west, repeating the pattern till the sirens began to fade. He guessed somebody must have called the ambulance for Bridger Martin--and the cops too, because there'd been another siren going there for a while, and once they sorted things out they'd be looking for him. Without breaking stride, he fished out his shades, then shrugged out of the jacket and threw it over one shoulder. When he turned the next corner, he was on a street that dipped steeply down toward the train station--there was a bar there he knew, an old man's bar in an old hotel that had been around forever--and he figured he'd slip in there where it was quiet and dark and nobody would even look up from their drinks. Order a beer. Sit at the bar. He'd be safe there and he'd have time to think things out.
He needed to call Natalia's cell, that was his first priority, but when he patted down his pockets his own cell was missing and it came to him that he'd left it on the dash of the car--he could see it there, just as if he were re-running a video. And why was it there on the dash and not in his pocket? Because he'd called her from the car in the parking lot at the mall to tell her he was going to run into the toy store a minute because he had to get something and she'd said, “For Madison?” and he'd said, “Maybe,” and she'd said, “That's sweet. You're sweet. And I am sorry to be so late for you and I will be only one minute more.”
Right. But where was she now? Did the police have her? Were they asking her for ID? Asking about her immigration status? Asking who had assaulted Bridger Martin even while she told them it was Bridger Martin as if she were reliving some sort of Abbot and Costello routine? And who was the car registered to? And where did she live? And then there was Sukie. And his mother. Madison at camp. It was a nightmare, and he couldn't see any way out of it, because even before this bitch had showed up on the scene and sent everything into orbit he'd been wondering how he was going to cover himself when his mother called him Peck, or worse yet, Billy, and Natalia locked those caustic eyes on him.
