T. Boyle - Talk Talk

The compromise was something called Pancakes Jubilee, three rubbery thin wafers of griddle-compacted dough buried under a mound of strawberries and about three feet of whipped cream. Natalia, whose appetite always astounded him, had the Cattleman's Breakfast, four eggs sunny-side up with a sixteen-ounce steak, ranch beans, pico de gallo and a basket of flour tortillas. He had coffee, black.

“Do you not want to try a bite of my steak?” Natalia kept asking him. “Did you not say you wanted a steak? Here, try. It's good.”

He was furious-acting like a child himself, he knew it. “No,” he said, “I don't want your steak. Tahoe. I'll eat in Tahoe. Okay?”

Across the table, Madison wore a beard of whipped cream, whipped cream to her nostrils and beyond. Her eyes were glazed with the sugar fix and the fork was stuck to her hand. Breakfast was over.

Outside, where people stood around on the faux ranch-house porch picking their teeth and grinding mints between their molars, the heat seized him. It must have been a hundred already, though his watch showed just past nine-thirty in the morning. The sun was a hammer. It wanted to take everything down, flatten it right to the ground. There was a smell of incineration, of grease blown out through the kitchen fans, of the kind of death that mummified you before you hit the ground. He watched a crow, its feathers the color of coal dust, dance around something crushed on the pavement as he shrugged out of his sport coat and folded it over one arm. Jesus. How could people stand this shit? How could anybody actually live here? he wondered, tensing up all over again, and no, the coffee hadn't helped, not a bit. He took Natalia by the arm. Down the three bleached wooden steps they went, to the burning lake of the parking lot. Predictably, Madison said, “Mommy, I'm “hot.””

It was then, at that precise moment, that the black Jetta pulled into the lot and he saw the two faces suspended there behind the sunstruck windshield. “A man and a woman.” Everything went silent, the speakers hidden up under the support beams piping out a thin tinny jangle of country guitars, the whoosh of the traffic on the highway, the jet poised overhead. He'd trained himself to stay cool, be cool, to hide the least tic of emotion behind an immobile face and the stark stabbing outraged sheen of his eyes, pure aggression, and he stared right at them, stared hard, though he was scared, afraid they might swing out in front of the restaurant and try to run him down, and spooked on a deeper level too: how in Christ's name did they know he was here? Here, of all places? Even he hadn't known he was going to be here.

Seconds, that was all he had, because the woman-Dana Halter, Dr. Dana Halter-was bent over her cell phone and if the cops stepped in and checked his ID against hers “or his, Bridger's,” there was no hope of talking his way clear of this. Even as he increased the pressure on Natalia's arm, even as she said, “What is the hurry?” and he silenced her with a look, snatched up Madison as if she were an overnight bag and set a brisk pace for the car, it came to him that they must have been hidden somewhere in the lot and followed him when he pulled out of the condo. He cursed himself. He was lax, he was stupid. All of this shit-and he was so wired suddenly it was as if he'd grabbed hold of a high-voltage cable with his bare hands-all of it, all of it, he'd called down on his own head.

But there was the car, a hundred feet away, Madison squirming in his grip, Natalia gone white with the fear that sprang up full-blown out of his frantic headlong urgency, seventy-five feet, fifty, and the two of them were out of the car now, shouting something, brandishing cell phones-both of them, they both had phones, as if Cingular wireless was the supreme force in the universe. “No,” he spat, “no,” as he flung Madison sprawling into the back, jerked Natalia in beside him and slammed the door, “no time”-he meant the belts, the seatbelts-and so what if the buzzer cried out to warn him, and these people, these creeps, were looming up in the rearview, the doors were locked, the engine cranked, and with a flick of the wrist he was out of the parking space, straight ahead, up over the concrete bumper and on into the dirt lot beyond it, heading for the highway in a plume of crushed weed, flying cans and airborne dust.

Strangely, perversely, he found himself worrying about the paint job as he caromed across the vacant lot, thumped through a gully and bore up onto the ramp, cutting off two dickheads in an old hearse with a band logo filigreed across the back panel even as the tires took hold of the pavement and began to sing. The car didn't matter. It was nothing. He'd have to lose it anyway, and soon. There was the blast of the dickheads' horn and then he was right up on the rear end of a Winnebago doing about two miles an hour where the ramp narrowed before merging onto the highway. A glance at Natalia's grim bloodless face, and then his eyes went to the rearview, where the hearse was gunning up on him, horn squalling and the two dickheads stabbing their middle fingers at the windshield. They didn't interest him. What interested him was the black Jetta tearing out of the parking lot and up onto the ramp behind them.

Natalia didn't say a word. Even Madison, rough handling and all, seemed to be holding her breath. Directly ahead of them was the creeping beige, white and lemon-yellow wall of the Winnebago, bicycles, lawn chairs and cooking grills strapped to it as if in some frenzy of reenactment, and right there on their bumper was the hearse. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the ramp fell under the wheels, no room to maneuver on either side because the narrow sweeping arc of it had been cut through rock the color of dried blood, and there were two horns competing now, the Jetta on the bumper of the hearse, arms waving, mouths flung open in rigid oral display. He heard his own voice then, just as the ramp began to broaden out to the highway: “Put your seat belts on.”

What amazed him about it later was the way the Jetta had stayed with him. The hearse fell back as if it were hooked to a chain and the Winnebago was just part of the scenery, but the Jetta came on even as he put his foot to the floor and cut everything else away from him. When he hit a hundred and ten, he was aware of a movement beside him-Natalia, her mouth clamped and her eyes in retreat, sliding in back to cling to her daughter-but the gesture meant nothing, not now. At a hundred twenty the car discovered what it was made for, all those German horses, the Autobahn, “cruising speed.” There was a part of him that knew he was in trouble, knew that they could be punching in 911 and telling the dispatcher anything, that there was a drunk driver up ahead, a reckless driver, a deranged life-endangering criminal in a wine-colored Mercedes with dealer placards that might as well have been flags whipping in the wind, but there was another part, a larger part, that just didn't give a shit, the part that ran on adrenaline and pushed his foot to the floor.

Later, after the Jetta had become a memory and Natalia had run out of breath bitching at him and he'd filled whole cauldrons with qualifications and sophistries and outright lies (Oh, hey, they were bad people, people he'd done a real estate deal with who didn't want to honor their contractual obligations, and didn't she know real estate people were the worst?), after she fell asleep wrapped up in back with her daughter and he eased off the main road at Placerville to take the Gold Country Highway back on up to I-80, he began to think about the immediate future. Tahoe was out, definitely out, and he'd have to ditch the car as soon as he could, but 80 would take him to Reno and from Reno he could find a road south to Vegas-it would be a long drive, a lot longer than he'd counted on, and it would involve some elaborate explanation and days of worship at the altar of her, but it was necessary at this point. He'd had a close call. A learning experience.