Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

Lucy spoke to him as she would to Alida. “I know. They couldn’t possibly have been alive. There almost certainly wasn’t time for them to feel anything.” She nearly put her hand on his sleeve to comfort him.

“I didn’t see it say nothing on your driver’s license about ‘doctor,’ Lucy.”

Oh, dear. She’d affronted his precious dignity. She felt the muscles in her cheeks spring taut at the rebuff.

“We better get back to what you seen. Like you haven’t said nothing about the pickup — blue Dodge, right?”

“I didn’t see it.” But as soon as she spoke, memory leaped to contradict, as an image, washed out in color, not quite in focus, came to mind, of a big, mud-spattered pickup with a dented tailgate. But it wasn’t blue. More a sort of rusty orange. Was that it? Why could she not remember what other people had clearly seen? “I mean, I’m not sure…”

“That logging road dead-ends. We’ll be checking it out.”

The orange pickup, surely it was parked at the strip mall where she’d put down the top. That was where she’d seen it. Yet even as she realized its untruthfulness, memory was busy again, slotting the orange truck into the vacant space in the puzzle. She seemed to see it braking to make a sudden unsignaled right, and the Infiniti swerving left to avoid it, heading straight into the path of the rising semi.

“I don’t know.” Orange was turning into blue as treacherous memory got all its ducks in a row. “I’m sorry, I’m blanking out. If I could think it through for a minute or two, I’m sure—”

“It don’t much matter. We got other witnesses.”

He meant better, more trustworthy ones, not tiresome flakes like her.

“That address on your license? It’s still current?”

Grateful for a question that had a certain answer, she said, “Yes, it’s current.”

“Phone number?”

She gave it to him.

“We’ll get back to you if we need to. Where you headed?”

“Useless Bay.”

“You think you’re safe to drive, Lucy?”

“Yes, I’ll be fine.”

“I could get an officer to run you over there, it’s just a couple miles. I could drive the Alfa.”

“No thanks. Honestly, I’m okay.”

She was totally not okay. When the boy insisted on seeing her to the car, she found herself walking like a drunk, with laborious concentration on each clumsy step, fooling the cop into letting her go.

“What year is it?”

For a moment, she took this as a trick question, meant to test her mental state, then it registered. “Oh, the car.” But when she named the date, the boy’s only response was an indifferent grunt.

As she seated herself behind the wheel, the boy stood beside her, hand on the door, watching — or was he just interested in the car? Luckily, she’d left the key in the ignition. Thinking painfully hard about each move, she let in the clutch, shifted the gearstick into neutral, and turned on the engine. She flinched at the sudden sound of the DJ’s voice, loud enough to scare birds from the trees, saying, in a tranquilized, affectless drawl, “We’ve just been listening to Symphony Number 7 by Gustav Mahler, played by the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Christoph—”

She switched him off, distractedly thinking that at least she’d got Mahler right.

The boy was still there, his hand a few inches from her left wrist. His fingernails could do with a trim. She tried smiling at him to show what fine shape she was in to drive, but she botched the job and felt the smile coming out as a lewd stripper’s wink. The boy’s face stiffened into the mask of surly toughness they must have taught him in cop school. “You better drive safe now.” A threat, not a well-wishing.

But she seemed to have forgotten how. The tight steering, usually a pleasure, was her enemy, as she kept overcorrecting, making the car wobble down the road, nose twitching from side to side like a prairie dog’s. Driving by eye, not instinct, she crawled past the stalled traffic that had backed up from the scene of the crash and felt the eyes of every driver on her, as if the whole character of the morning catastrophe were written on her face and in her lousy driving. She risked a glance at the rearview, half expecting to find the boy cop haring after her on foot, but saw only the red, white, and blue flashes of the emergency vehicles putting on their untimely light show against the dark firs.

Then more police, putting out signs and turning cars around. She crept past them fearfully, trying to hide her incompetence as they waved her through. She wanted to apologize for the Spider — its ridiculous air of summer fun, like a dancing clown at a funeral.

At the Useless Bay turnoff, waiting to make a left, Lucy realized with a nauseous jolt that she’d seen the people who’d been killed on the ferry, an older couple, big-city tourist types, overdressed for the casual Pacific Northwest. She’d spotted them first in the lounge — the tall man in a cashmere blazer, the woman with a suede pigskin jacket draped over her shoulders, her hair scraped back from her face and tied behind with a pink silk scarf. Later, in the crush of people going down the stairs to the car deck, the man had held the door open for Lucy; she’d thanked him, and they smiled at her with the perfectly synchronous smile of the long married. She’d warmed to them in that moment, envying them their vacation. Their silver car was parked a few spaces behind the Spider. They must have gone past her while she was taking down the top.

The road was clear. As she crossed, a rush of details came back to her: his gray hair, rather coarse and oily, swept in breaking waves behind his ears; the links of a gold chain against the white of her blouse; a whiff of male cologne; his uxorious stoop as he bent to listen to something she was saying when they were standing by the window in the lounge; her petite boniness and cautious walk, as if she were getting used to a replacement hip. Her voice : on the car deck, Lucy had heard her call across the Infiniti, from the driver’s side, “It’s already open, hon.” So she must have been driving…

She told herself that she was connected to these dead strangers by one random, polite smile, nothing more. It was 10:14, she had a job to do: she must evict the couple from her head, at least for now.

Two horses, a mare and a foal, stood by the barbed-wire fence of an overgrown paddock. Think horses, Lucy instructed herself as she stopped the car, think Montana. The piebald mare stared at her with an expression of vacant solemnity and lifted her tail to drop a turd. The foal, Lucy guessed, was two months old, still a little shaky on his pins — a rich chestnut, except for the white circles around his eyes and an irregular flash on his forehead like a question mark or a scythe. She inhaled the sane smell of horse and cut grass as the foal held her gaze with his comical bespectacled eyes. The bald pink skin around his mouth and nose made him look almost human in his infancy. He swung his big head to his mother’s teat and suckled for a few seconds, then, refreshed, turned his attention back to Lucy, his face full of candid foal-ish curiosity about this new oddity in his young life.

She put the car in gear and drove off, slowly, but without the shakes, feeling more or less restored. She was fully aware of the dead couple, but had managed to put them on hold, where they’d stay until she had time to take their call. So long as she could live in the moment, she’d be okay. Later, she’d get back to them — would feel sorrow for them, if she could. But not yet, not now. Accelerating cautiously through a bend, catching the sudden seaside tang of salt, mud, and tide wrack, she was securely back in the driver’s seat, in control again.