Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

She lay awake all night, started at every sound. Mack snored like an idiot, with no understanding that his life was in danger. But he was a simple man, and that was why she’d fallen for him, and then it was why she despised him, and now it was why she liked him again. She hugged the mound of his back and prayed for her own salvation, for her and Mack, for every small thing in life she had not known to appreciate.

J.D. Joss and Bo Crawford separated. J.D. broke into an abandoned house, ate spoiled food, drank spoiled water, soiled his pants, and left clues. He was caught almost immediately, drunk, covered with insect bites, with a backpack that held a half-eaten package of Oreo cookies and a hammer.

Bo eluded capture for ten days. He created a legend in the small factory towns around San Pablo Bay, like the one where Gordon Hauser grew up. Authorities later closed the jail in downtown Martinez. Built a new one. Modern, state-of-the-art. There would be no more escapes.

During the tense ten-day stakeout, a woman called a local radio station. She lived on the outskirts of Crockett and had seen Bo Crawford emerge from the trees, down near the railroad bed. She faced him unafraid, she said, tried to catch his eye, to let him know . Gordon remembered that so well. Her voice over the radio.

I wanted to let him know .

What did the woman want him to know? Gordon wondered, when he thought about this many years later, after hearing the news about Stanville, about Romy Hall.

What did she let him know, down by that railroad track? And what did she know?

That Bo Crawford existed. That he was a man on the run. She saw him, and she wanted him to see her. She was willing to take the risk. He was dangerous and possibly armed and she stood unhidden and adamant. She looked right at him. If he looked back at her, he would know that she knew that he had no right on this earth to freedom.

They will get you .

That was what she wanted to tell him with her look.

Part of the intimacy with nature that you acquire is the sharpening of the senses. Not that your hearing and eyesight become more acute, but you notice things more. In city life you tend to be turned inward. Your environment is crowded with irrelevant sights and sounds, and you get conditioned to block most of them out of your conscious mind. In the woods you get so that your awareness is turned outward, toward your environment. You are much more conscious of what goes on around you. You know what the sounds are, that come to your ears: this is a birdcall, that is the buzzing of a horse fly, this is a startled deer running off, this is the thump of a pine cone that has been cut down by a squirrel. If you hear a sound that you can’t identify, it immediately catches your attention, even if it is so faint as to be barely audible. You notice inconspicuous things on the ground, such as edible plants or animal tracks. If a human being has passed through and has left even just a small part of a footprint, you’ll probably notice it.

Kurt Kennedy woke up with two empty rosé bottles and a headache. The stewardess, he gets that you don’t call them that anymore, but the other term has never taken up residence in his mind, anyway the bitch took his drink away while he slept. Not the rosé, which had been in the knapsack between his knees, but his rum and Coke, which he’d ordered, and wasn’t finished drinking when she removed it from his tray, and that was the thing about an international flight. The booze was free and you drank it and no one bothered you about how much. They weren’t supposed to cut you off. He put on the help light over his seat. He was going to insist on another drink because he wasn’t done with the one she took away. The stewardess arrived and told him she took his drink because he was sleeping. He said that it exactly helped him sleep and was why he needed it back.

She bent down close.

“You and I know it’s a silly rule, but you can’t bring your own wine bottles on the plane.”

Trying to butter him up with her “you and I.” I’ve got plans when I step off this bird and you aren’t coming with me, old lady.

She was probably forty. Actually, she was a good-looking broad and he’d take a forty-year-old. Kurt himself was fifty-four. A woman his own age, the thought of it made him want to puke. But a lot of things were suddenly making him want to puke. He might puke for no reason. He didn’t feel very good. He’d been out all night in Cancún and had about ten nightclub stamps inked over the back of his hand. The last half of the night he could not remember. He had an image of getting into someone’s jeep, a man older and even drunker than he was, and the guy could not get out of his parking spot, just kept ramming the car in front, and then the car behind, then repeating, until Kennedy yelled at him to stop and got out of the guy’s jeep, but what happened then? He doesn’t know. He woke up at his Novotel and had pissed himself in his clothes.

At least he would not miss his flight. And he had time to shower, because, as every man knows, that’s supposed to wash off the misery and get him shipshape for traveling. He retched into the methane-fuming drain. People don’t know how to make anything. Can’t even vent a sewer pipe.

He got the wine at duty-free because he could, and because he wanted something of his own to drink on the plane. Made him claustrophobic to have to sit and wait for them to bring you something. Just watching the cart not come down the aisle made his mouth drier than Death Valley, and his medication already made his mouth dry. He wasn’t going to wait, he was going to bring his own beverages on the airplane for the long flight from Cancún to San Francisco. Got the two bottles and a coffee cup. Opened one of the bottles at the gate and starting pouring, tipping the knapsack like it was a drink, a T-shirt wedged between the two bottles to keep them from clinking.

He would not call it loaded, how he felt when he got on the plane. He was only starting to relax. He’d been on edge the whole time in Cancún. It was supposed to be a vacation but minute by minute he kept checking in with himself to find out if he was having fun, and he didn’t know and this made him anxious, so he took another Klonopin and lay down or got up or went to the bar or walked around on the sand, but it burned his feet and he had to face down the fact that he was not a beachy-type person and just wanted to get home and go to the Mars Room and see Vanessa, put her body on his lap. It was the only way in the world he knew to get peace. Every person deserves peace. He meant, whether anyone deserves anything is beside the point. He needed certain things to feel okay. Vanessa was among those things. He needed dark and heavy curtains, because he had a sleeping problem. He needed Klonopin, because he had a nerve problem. He needed Oxycontin because he had a pain problem. He needed liquor because he had a drinking problem. Money because he had a living problem, and show him someone who doesn’t need money. He needed this girl because he had a girl problem. Problem was maybe the wrong word. He had a focus. Her name was Vanessa; that was her stage name but for him it was her name-name because it was the one he got to know her by. Vanessa filled in around all the hazier thoughts in his mind with something that was specific, and real. When he was near her, he felt good. Every person deserves to feel good. Especially him, since he was himself.

“Sure you can bring wine on the plane,” he told the old stewardess, crease lines forming around her mouth as she took in his reply. He gestured to the overhead bins, full of other passengers’ bottles of duty-free wine.