T. Boyle - Talk Talk

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.