T. Boyle - Talk Talk

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.