From a Buick 8

  "Step away from the truck, sir," George said in his flat and colorless Trooper voice. You'd never believe, hearing him talk to some John Q. at the side of the road, that he could scream himself hoarse on the Little League field, yelling at kids to bunt the damn ball and to keep their heads down while they were running the bases. Or kidding with them on the bench before their games to loosen them up.

  Lippy had never torn the Fruit Loops off any of George's shirts in study hall period four, and maybe that's why he stepped away from the truck when George told him to. Looking down at his boots as he did it, losing the grin. When guys like Brian Lippy lose the grin, what comes in to take its place is this kind of dopey sullenness.

  "Are you going to be trouble, sir?" George asked. He hadn't drawn his gun, but his hand was on the butt of it. "If you are, tell me now. Save us both some grief

  Lippy didn't say anything. Just looked down at his boots.

  "His name is Brian?" George asked me.

  "Brian Lippy." I was looking at the truck. Through the back window I could see the passenger, still sitting in the middle, not looking at us. Head dropped. I thought maybe he'd beaten her unconscious. Then one hand went up to her mouth and out of the mouth came a plume of cigarette smoke.

  "Brian, I want to know if we're going to have trouble. Answer up so I can hear you, now, just like a big boy."

  "Depends," Brian said, lifting his upper lip to get a good sneer on the word. I started toward the truck to do my share of the job. When my shadow passed over the toes of his boots, Brian kind of recoiled and took a step backward, as if it had been a snake instead of a shadow. He was high, all right, and to me it was seeming more like PCP or angel dust all the time.

  "Let me have your driver's license and registration," George said.

  Brian paid no immediate attention. He was looking at me again. "ED-die JACK-you-BOYS," he said, chanting it the way he and his friends always had back in high school, making a joke out of it. He hadn't worn any head-down Christs or Nazi swastikas back at Statler High, though; they would have sent him home if he'd tried that shit. Anyway, him saying my name like that got to me. It was like he'd found an old electrical switch, dusty and forgotten behind a door but still wired up. Still hot.

  He knew it, too. Saw it and started grinning. "Fat Eddie JACK-you-BOYS. How many boys did you jack, Eddie? How many boys did you jack in the shower room? Or did you just get right down on your knees and suck em off? Straight to the main event. Mister Takin Care of Business."

  "Want to close your mouth, Brian?" George asked. "You'll catch a fly." He took his handcuffs off his belt.

  Brian Lippy saw them and started to lose the grin again. "What you think you gonna do with those?"

  "If you don't hand me your operating papers right now, I'm going to put them on you, Brian. And if you resist, I can guarantee you two things: a broken nose and eighteen months in Castlemora for resisting arrest. Could be more, depending on which judge you draw. Now what do you think?"

  Brian took his wallet out of his back pocket. It was a greasy old thing with the logo of some rock group--Judas Priest, I think--inexpertly burned into it. Probably with the tip of a soldering iron. He started thumbing through the various compartments.

  "Brian," I said.

  He looked up.

  "The name is Jacubois, Brian. Nice French name. And I haven't been fat for quite awhile now."

  "You'll gain it back," he said, "fat boys always do."

  I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. He sounded like some halfbaked guest on a talkshow. He glowered at me, but there was something uncertain in it. He'd lost the advantage and he knew it.

  "Little secret," I said. "High school's over, my friend. This is your actual, real life. I know that's hard for you to believe, but you better get used to it. It's not just detention anymore. This actually counts."

  What I got was a kind of stupid gape. He wasn't getting it. They so rarely do.

  "Brian, I want to see your paperwork with no more delay," George said. "You put it right in my hand." And he held his hand out, palm up. Not very wise, you might say, but George Morgan had been a State Trooper for a long time, and in his judgment, this situation was now going in the right direction. Right enough, anyway, for him to decide he didn't need to put the cuffs on my old friend Brian just to show him who was in charge.

  I went over to the truck, glancing at my watch as I did. It was just about one-thirty in the afternoon. Hot. Crickets singing dry songs in the roadside grass. The occasional car passing by, the drivers slowing down for a good look. It's always nice when the cops have someone pulled over and it's not you. That's a real daymaker.

  The woman in the truck was sitting with her left knee pressed against the chrome post of Brian's Hurst shifter. Guys like Brian put them in just so they can stick a Hurst decal in the window, that's what I think. Next to the ones saying Fram and Pennzoil. She looked about twenty years old with long ironed brownette hair, not particularly clean, hanging to her shoulders. Jeans and a white tank top. No bra. Fat red pimples on her shoulders. A tat on one arm that said and one on the other saying BRIAN MY LUV. Nails painted candycane pink but all bitten down and ragged. And yes, there was blood. Blood and snot hanging out of her nose. More blood spattered up her cheeks like little birthmarks. Still more on her split lips and chin and tank top. Head down so the wings of her hair hid some of her face. Cigarette going up and down, tick-tock, either a Marlboro or a Winston, in those days before the prices went up and all the fringe people went to the cheap brands, you could count on it. And if it's Marlboro, it's always the hard pack. I have seen so many of them. Sometimes there's a baby and it straightens the guy up but usually it's just bad luck for the baby.

  "Here," she said, and lifted her right thigh a little. Under it was a slip of paper, canary yellow. "The registration. I tell him to keep his ticket in his wallet or the glove compartment, but it's always floppin around in here someplace with the Mickey Dee wrappers and the rest of the trash."

  She didn't sound stoned and there were no beer cans or liquor bottles floating around in the cab of the truck. That didn't make her sober, of course, but it was a step in the right direction. She also didn't seem like she was going to turn abusive, but of course that can change. In a hurry.

  "What's your name, ma'am?"

  "Sandra?"

  "Sandra what?"

  "McCracken?"

  "Do you have any ID, Ms McCracken?"

  "Yeah."

  "Show me, please."

  There was a little leatherette clutch purse on the seat beside her. She opened it and started pawing through it. She worked slowly, and with her head bent over her purse, her face disappeared completely. You could still see the blood on her tank top but not on her face; you couldn't see the swollen lips that turned her mouth into a cut plum, or the old mouse fading around one eye.

  And from behind me: "Fuck no, I ain't getting in there. What makes you think you got a right to put me in there?"

  I looked around. George was holding the back door of the cruiser open. A limo driver couldn't have done it more courteously. Except the back seat of a limo doesn't have doors you can't open and windows you can't unroll from the inside, or mesh between the front and the back. Plus, of course, that faint smell of puke. I've never driven a cruiser--well, except for a "week or so after we got the new Caprices--that didn't have that smell.

  "What makes me think I have the right is you're busted, Brian. Did you just hear me read you your rights?"

  "The fuck for, man? I wasn't speedin!"

  "That's true, you were too busy tuning up on your girlfriend to really get the pedal to the metal, but you were driving recklessly, driving to endanger. Plus assault. Let's not forget that. So get in."

  "Man, you can't--"

  "Get in, Brian, or I'll put you up against the car and cuff you. Hard, so it hurts."

  "Like to see you try it."

  "Would you?" George asked, his voice almost too low to hear even in that dozy afternoo
n quiet.

  Brian Lippy saw two things. The first was that George could do it. The second was that George sort of wanted to do it. And Sandra McCracken would see it happen. Not a good thing, letting your bitch see you get cuffed. Bad enough she saw you getting busted.

  "You'll be hearing from my lawyer," said Brian Lippy, and got into the back of the cruiser.

  George slammed the door and looked at me. "We're gonna hear from his lawyer."

  "Don't you hate that," I said.

  The woman poked my arm with something. I turned and saw it was the corner of her driver's license laminate. "Here," she said. She was looking at me. It was only a moment before she turned away and began rummaging in her bag again, this time coming out with a couple of tissues, but it was long enough for me to decide she really was straight. Dead inside, but straight.

  "Trooper Jacubois, the vehicle operator states his registration is in his truck," George said.

  "Yeah, I have it."

  George and I met at the pickup's ridiculous jacked rear bumper--I DO WHATEVER THE LITTLE VOICES TELL ME TO, I EAT AMISH--and I handed him the registration.

  "Will she?" he asked in a low voice.

  "No," I said.

  "Sure?"

  "Pretty."

  "Try," George said, and went back to the cruiser. My old schoolmate started yelling at him the second George leaned through the driver's-side window to snag the mike. George ignored him and stretched the cord to its full length, so he could stand in the sun. "Base, this is 6, copy-back?"

  I returned to the open door of the pickup. The woman had snubbed her cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray and lit a fresh one. Up and down went the fresh cigarette. Out from between the mostly closed wings of her hair came the plumes of used smoke.

  "Ms McCracken, we're going to take Mr. Lippy to our barracks--Troop D, on the hill? Like you to follow us."

  She shook her head and began to work with the Kleenex. Bending her head to it rather than raising the tissue to her face, closing the curtains of her hair even farther. The hand with the cigarette in it now resting on the leg of her jeans, the smoke rising straight up.

  "Like you to follow us, Ms McCracken." Speaking just as softly as I could. Trying to make it caring and knowing and just between us. That's how the shrinks and family therapists say to handle it, but what do they know? I kind of hate those SOBs, that's the ugly truth. They come out of the middle class smelling of hairspray and deodorant and they talk to us about spousal abuse and low self-esteem, but they don't have a clue about places like Lassburg County, which played out once when the coal finished up and then again when big steel went away to Japan and China. Does a "woman like Sandra McCracken even hear soft and caring and nonthreatening? Once upon a time, maybe. I didn't think anymore. If, on the other hand, I'd grabbed all that hair out of her face so she had to look at me and then shouted "YOU'RE COMING! YOU'RE COMING AND YOU'RE GOING TO MAKE AN ASSAULT CHARGE AGAINST HIM! YOU'RE COMING, YOU DUMB BEATEN BITCH! YOU ALLOWING CUNT! YOU ARE! YOU FUCKING WELL ARE!", that might have made a difference. That might have worked. You have to speak their language. The shrinks and the therapists, they don't want to hear that. They don't want to believe there is a language that's not their language.

  She shook her head again. Not looking at me. Smoking and not looking at me.

  "Like you to come on up and swear out an assault complaint on Mr. Lippy there. You pretty much have to, you know. I mean, we saw him hitting you, my partner and I were right behind you, and we got a real good look."

  "I don't have to," she said, "and you can't make me." She was still using that clumpy greasy old mop of brownette to hide her face, but she spoke with a certain quiet authority, all the same. She knew we couldn't force her to press charges because she'd been down this road before.

  "So how long do you want to take it?" I asked her.

  Nothing. The head down. The face hidden. The way she'd lowered her head and hidden her face at twelve when her teacher asked her a hard question in class or when the other girls made fun of her because she was getting tits before they did and that made her a chunky-fuck. That's what girls like her grow that hair for, to hide behind. But knowing didn't give me anymore patience with her. Less, if anything. Because, see, you have to take care of yourself in this world. Especially if you ain't purty.

  "Sandra."

  A little movement of her shoulders when I switched over to her first name. No more than that. And boy, they make me mad. It's how easy they give up. They're like birds on the ground.

  "Sandra, look at me."

  She didn't want to, but she would. She was used to doing what men said. Doing what men said had pretty much become her life's work. "

  "Turn your head and look at me."

  She turned her head but kept her eyes down. Most of the blood was still on her face. It wasn't a bad face. She probably was a little bit purty when someone wasn't tuning up on her. Nor did she look as stupid as you'd think she must be. As stupid as she wanted to be.

  "I'd like to go home," she said in a faint child's voice. "I had a nosebleed and I need to clean up."

  "Yeah, I know you do. Why? You run into a door? I bet that was it, wasn't it?"

  "That's right. A door." There wasn't even defiance in her face. No trace of her boyfriend's i eat amish "tude. She was just waiting for it to be over. This roadside chatter wasn't real life. Getting hit, that was real life. Hawking back the snot and the blood and the tears all together and swallowing it like cough syrup. "I was comin down the hall to use the bat'roorn, and Bri, I dittun know he was in there and he come out all at once, fast, and the door--"

  "How long, Sandra?"

  "How long what?"

  "How long you going to go on eating his shit?"

  Her eyes widened a little. That was all.

  "Until he knocks all your teeth out?"

  "I'd like to go home."

  "If I check at Statler Memorial, how many times am I going to find your name? Cause you run into a lot of doors, don't you?"

  "Why don't you leave me alone? I ain't bothering you."

  "Until he fractures your skull? Until he kills your ass?"

  "I want to go home, officer."

  I want to say That was when I knew I'd lost her but it would be a lie because you can't lose what you never had. She'd sit there until hell froze over or until I got pissed enough to do something that would get me in trouble later. Like hit her. Because I wanted to hit her. If I hit her, at least she'd know I was there.

  I keep a card case in my back pocket. I took it out, riffled through the cards, and found the one I wanted. "This woman's in Statler Village. She's talked to hundreds of young women like you, and helped a lot of them. If you need pro bono, which means free counseling, that'll happen. She'll work it out with you. Okay?"

  I held the card in front of her face, between the first two fingers of my right hand. When she didn't take it, I dropped it on to the seat. Then I went back to the cruiser to get the registration. Brian Lippy was sitting in the middle of the back seat with his chin lowered to the neck of his T-shirt, staring up at me from under his brows. He looked like some fucked-up hotrod Napoleon.

  "Any luck?" George asked.

  "Nah," I said. "She hasn't had enough fun yet."

  I took the registration back to the track. She'd moved over behind the wheel. The truck's big V-8 was rumbling. She had pushed the clutch in, and her right hand was on the shifter-knob. Bitten pink nails against chrome. If places like rural Pennsylvania had flags, you could put that on it. Or maybe a sixpack of Iron City Beer and a pack of Winstons.

  "Drive safely, Ms. McCracken," I said, handing her the yellow.

  "Yeah," she said, and pulled out. Wanting to give me some lip and not daring because she was well-trained. The truck did some jerking at first--she wasn't as good with his manual transmission as she maybe thought she was--and she jerked with it. Back and forth, hair flying. All at once I could see it again, him all over the road, driving his one piece of property w
ith his one hand and punching the piss out of his other piece of property with other one, and I felt sick to my stomach. Just before she finally achieved second gear, something white fluttered out of the driver's-side window. It was the card I'd given her.

  I went back to the cruiser. Brian was still sitting with his chin down on his chest, giving me his fucked-up Napoleon look from beneath his brows. Or maybe it was Rasputin. I got in on the passenger side, feeling very hot and tired. Just to make things complete, Brian started chanting from behind me. "Fat ED-die JACK-you-BOYS. How many boys--"

  "Oh shut up," I said.

  "Come on back here and shut me up, Fat Eddie. Why don't you come on back here and try it?"

  Just another wonderful day in the PSP, in other words. This guy was going to be back in whatever shithole he called home by seven o'clock, drinking a beer while Vanna spun the Wheel of Fortune. I glanced at my watch--1.44 P.M.--and then picked up the microphone. "Base, this is 6."

  "Copy, 6." Shirley right back at me, calm as a cool breeze. Shirley just about to get her flowers from Islington and Avery. Out on CR 46 in Poteenville, about twenty miles from our 20, a Norco West tanker had just collided with a schoolbus, killing the schoolbus's driver, Mrs. Esther Mayhew. George Stankowski had been close enough to hear the bang of the collision, so who says there's never a cop around when you need one?

  "We are Code 15 and 17-base, copy?" Asshole in custody and headed home, in other words.

  "Roger, 6, you have one subject in custody or what, over?"

  "One subject, roger."

  "This is Fat Fuck One, over and out," Brian said from the back seat. He began to laugh--the high, chortling laugh of the veteran stoner. He also began to stomp his cowboy boots up and down. We'd be half an hour getting back to the barracks. I had an idea it was going to be a long ride.

  Huddie

  I dropped the SC's phone into the cradle and almost trotted across to dispatch, where Shirley was still working hard, bending active Troopers west. "Norco says it's chlorine liquid," I told her. "That's a break. Chlorine's nasty, but it's not usually fatal."