Desperation

  "Are they a gang?" Peter asked. He still didn't see where this was going.

  "Close as you'd get in a place as small as Fallon," the cop said. He raised Peter's license to his face, looked at it, looked at Peter, lowered it again. But he did not offer to give it back. "Dropouts, for the most part. And one of their hobbies is kifing out-of-state license plates. It's like a dare thing. I imagine they got yours while you were in buying your cold drinks or using the facilities."

  "You know this and they still do it?" Mary asked.

  "Fallon's not my town. I rarely go there. Their ways are not my ways."

  "What should we do about the missing plate?" Peter asked. "I mean, this is a mess. The car's registered in Oregon, but my sister has gone back to New York to live. She hated Reed--"

  "Did she?" the cop asked. "Gosh, now!"

  Peter could feel Mary's eyes shift to him, probably wanting him to share her moment of amusement, but that didn't seem like a good idea to him. Not at all.

  "She said going to school there was like trying to go to school in the middle of a Grateful Dead concert," he said. "Anyway, she flew back to New York. My wife and I thought it would be fun to go out and get the car for her, bring it back to New York. Deirdre packed a bunch of her stuff in the trunk ... clothes, mostly . . ."

  He was babbling again, and he made himself stop.

  "So what do I do? We can't very well drive all the way across the country with no license plate on the back of the car, can we?"

  The cop walked toward the front of the Acura, moving very deliberately. He still had Peter's license and Deirdre's canary-yellow registration slip in one hand. His Sam Browne belt creaked. When he reached the front of the car he put his hands behind his back and stood frowning down at something. To Peter he looked like an interested patron in an art gallery. Dastardly, he'd said. A dastardly bunch. Peter didn't think he had ever actually heard that word used in conversation.

  The cop walked back toward them. Mary moved next to Peter, but her fright seemed gone. She was looking at the big man with interest, that was all.

  "The front plate's okay," the cop said. "Put that one on the back. You won't have any problem getting to New York on that basis."

  "Oh," Peter said. "Okay. Good idea."

  "Do you have a wrench and screwdriver? I think all my tools're back sitting on a bench in the town garage." The cop grinned. It lit his whole face, informed his eyes, turned him into a different man. "Oh. These're yours." He held out the license and registration.

  "There's a little toolkit in the trunk, I think," Mary said. She sounded giddy, and that was how Peter felt. Pure relief, he supposed. "I saw it while I was putting in my makeup case. Between the spare tire and the side."

  "Officer, I want to thank you," Peter said.

  The big cop nodded. He wasn't looking at Peter, though; his gray eyes were apparently fixed on the mountains off to his left. "Just doing my job."

  Peter walked to the driver's door of the car, wondering why he and Mary had been so afraid in the first place.

  That's nonsense, he told himself as he pulled the keys out of the ignition switch. They were on a smile-face keychain, which was pretty much par for the course--Deirdre's course, anyway. Mr. Smiley-Smile (her name for him) was his sister's trademark. She put happy yellow ones on the flaps of most of her letters, the occasional green one with a downturned mouth and a blah tongue stuck out if she happened to be having a bad day. I wasn't afraid, not really. Neither was Mary.

  Boink, a lie. He had been afraid, and Mary ... well, Mary had been damned close to terrified.

  Okay, maybe we were a little freaked, he thought, picking out the trunk key as he walked to the back of the car again. So sue us. The sight of Mary standing next to the big cop was like some sort of optical illusion; the top of her head barely came up to the bottom of his ribcage.

  Peter opened the trunk. On the left, neatly packed (and covered with Hefty bags to keep the road dust off them), were Deirdre's clothes. In the center, Mary's makeup case and their two suitcases--his n hers--were wedged in between the green bundles and the spare tire. Although "tire" was much too grand a word for it, Peter thought. It was one of those blow-up doughnuts, good for a run to the nearest service station. If you were lucky.

  He looked between the doughnut and the trunk's sidewall. There was nothing there.

  "Mare, I don't see--"

  "There." She pointed. "That gray thing? That's it. It's worked its way in back of the spare, that's all."

  He could have snaked his arm into the gap, but it seemed easier just to lift the uninflated rubber doughnut out of the way. He was leaning it against the back bumper when he heard Mary's sudden intake of breath. It sounded as if she had been pinched or poked.

  "Oh hey," the big cop said mildly. "What's this?"

  Mary and the cop were looking into the trunk. The cop looked interested and slightly bemused. Mary's eyes were bulging, horrified. Her lips were trembling. Peter turned, looking into the trunk again, following their gaze. There was something in the spare-tire well. It had been under the doughnut. For a moment he either didn't know what it was or didn't want to know what it was, and then that crawling sensation started in his lower belly again. This time there was also a sense of his sphincter's not loosening but dropping, as if the muscles which ordinarily held it up where it belonged had dozed off. He became aware that he was squeezing his buttocks together, but even that was far away, in another time zone. He felt an all-too-brief certainty that this was a dream, had to be.

  The big cop gave him a look, those bright gray eyes still peculiarly empty, then reached into the spare-tire well and brought out a Baggie, a big one, a gallon-size, and stuffed full of greenish-brown herbal matter. The flap had been sealed with strapping tape. Plastered on the front was a round yellow sticker. Mr. Smiley-Smile. The perfect emblem for potheads like his sister, whose adventures in life could have been titled Through Darkest America with Bong and Roach-Clip. She had gotten pregnant while stoned, had undoubtedly decided to marry Roger Finney while stoned, and Peter knew for a fact that she had left Reed (carrying a one-point-forget-it grade average) because there was too much dope floating around and she just couldn't say no to it. She'd been up front about that part, at least, and he had actually looked through the Acura for stashes--it would be stuff she'd forgotten about rather than stuff she'd actually hidden, most likely--before they left Portland. He'd looked under the Hefty bags her clothes were stored in, and Mary had thumbed through the clothes themselves (neither admitting out loud what they were looking for, both knowing), but neither of them had thought to look under the doughnut.

  The goddam doughnut.

  The cop squeezed the Baggie with one oversized thumb as if it were a tomato. He reached into his pocket and produced a Swiss Army knife. He plucked out the smallest blade.

  "Officer," Peter said in a weak voice. "Officer, I don't know how that--"

  "Shhh," the big cop said, and cut a tiny slit in the Baggie.

  Peter felt Mary's hand tugging at his sleeve. He took her hand, this time folding his fingers over hers. All at once he could see Deirdre's pale, pretty face floating just behind his eyes. Her blond hair, which still fell to her shoulders in natural Stevie Nicks ringlets. Her eyes, which were always a bit confused.

  You stupid little bitch, he thought. You ought to be very grateful that you're not where I can get my hands on you right now.

  "Officer--" Mary tried.

  The cop raised his hand to her, palm out, then put the tiny slit in the Baggie against his nose and sniffed. His eyes drifted closed. After a moment he opened them again and lowered the Baggie. He held out his other hand, palm up. "Give me your keys, sir," he said.

  "Officer, I can explain this--"

  "Give me your keys."

  "If you just--"

  "Are you deaf? Give me your keys."

  He only raised his voice a little, but it was enough to start Mary crying. Feeling like someone who is having an out-of-body exp
erience, Peter dropped Deirdre's car-keys into the cop's waiting hand and then put his arm around his wife's shaking shoulders.

  " 'Fraid you folks are going to have to come with me," the cop said. His eyes went from Peter to Mary and then back to Peter again. When they did, Peter realized what it was about them that bothered him. They were bright, like the minutes before sunrise on a foggy morning, but they were also dead, somehow.

  "Please," Mary said, her voice wet. "It's a mistake. His sister--"

  "Get in the car," the cop said, indicating his cruiser. The flashers were still pulsing on the roof, bright even in the bright desert daylight. "Right now, please, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson."

  4

  The rear seat was extremely cramped (of course it would be, Peter thought distractedly, a man that big would have the front seat back as far as it would go). There were stacks of paper in the footwell behind the driver's seat (the back of that seat was actually warped from the cop's weight) and more on the back deck. Peter picked one up--it had a dried, puckered coffee-ring on it--and saw it was a DARE flyer. At the top was a picture of a kid sitting in a doorway. There was a dazed, vacant expression on his face (he looked the way Peter felt right now, in fact), and the coffee-ring circled his head like a halo. USERS ARE LOSERS, the folder said.

  There was mesh between the front of the car and the back, and no handles or window-cranks on the doors. Peter had begun to feel like a character in a movie (the one which came most persistently to mind was Midnight Express), and these details only added to that sensation. His best judgement was that he had talked too much about too many things already, and it would be well for him and Mary to stay quiet, at least until they got to wherever Officer Friendly meant to take them. It was probably good advice, but it was hard advice to follow. Peter found himself with a powerful urge to tell Officer Friendly that a terrible mistake had been made here--he was an assistant professor of English, his specialty was postwar American fiction, he had recently published a scholarly article called "James Dickey and the New Southern Reality" (a piece which had generated a great deal of controversy in certain ivied academic bowers), and, furthermore, that he hadn't smoked dope in years. He wanted to tell the cop that he might be a little bit overeducated by central Nevada standards, but was still, basically, one of the good guys.

  He looked at Mary. Her eyes were full of tears, and he was suddenly ashamed of the way he had been thinking--all me, me, me and I, I, I. His wife was in this with him; he'd do well to remember that. "Pete, I'm so scared," she said in a whisper that was almost a moan.

  He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. The skin was as cool as clay beneath his lips. "It'll be all right. We'll straighten this out."

  "Word of honor?"

  "Word of honor."

  After putting them into the back seat of the cruiser, the cop had returned to the Acura. He had been looking into the trunk for at least two minutes now. Not searching it, not even moving anything around, just staring in with his hands clasped behind his back, as if mesmerized. Now he jerked like a man waking suddenly from a nap, slammed the Acura's trunk shut and walked back to the Caprice. It canted to the left when he got in, and from the springs beneath there came a tired but somehow resigned groan. The back seat bulged a little further, and Peter grimaced at the sudden pressure on his knees.

  Mary should have taken this side, he thought, but it was too late now. Too late for a lot of things, actually.

  The cruiser's engine was running. The cop dropped the transmission into gear and pulled back onto the road. Mary turned to watch the Acura drop behind them. When she faced front again, Peter saw that the tears which had been standing in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks.

  "Please listen to me," she said, speaking to the cropped blond hair on the back of that enormous skull. The cop had laid his Smokey Bear hat aside again, and to Peter the top of his head looked to be no more than a quarter of an inch from the Caprice's roof. "Please, okay? Try to understand. That isn't our car. You have to understand that much at least, I know you do, because you saw the registration. It's my sister-in-law's. She's a pothead. Half her brain-cells--"

  "Mare--" Peter laid a hand on her arm. She shook it off.

  "No! I'm not going to spend the rest of the day answering questions in some dipshit police station, maybe in a jail cell, because your sister's selfish and forgetful and ... and ... all fucked up!"

  Peter sat back--his knees were still being pinched pretty severely but he thought he could live with it--and looked out the dust-coated side window. They were a mile or two east of the Acura now, and he could see something up ahead, pulled over on the shoulder of the westbound lane. Some sort of vehicle. Big. A truck, maybe.

  Mary had switched her gaze from the back of the cop's head to the rearview mirror, trying to make eye contact with him. "Half of Deirdre's brain-cells are fried and the other half are on permanent vacation in the Emerald City. The technical term is 'burnout,' and I'm sure you've seen people like her, Officer, even out here. What you found under the spare tire probably is dope, you're probably right about that, but not our dope! Can't you see that?"

  The thing up ahead, off the road with its tinted windshield pointed in the direction of Fallon and Carson City and Lake Tahoe, wasn't a truck after all; it was an RV. Not one of the real dinosaurs, but still pretty big. Cream-colored, with a dark green stripe running along the side. The words FOUR HAPPY WANDERERS were printed in the same dark green on the RV's blunt nose. The vehicle was road-dusty and canted over in an awkward, unnatural way.

  As they neared it, Peter saw an odd thing: all the tires in his view appeared to be flat. He thought maybe the double set of back tires on the passenger side was flat, too, although he only caught the briefest glimpse of them. That many flat shoes would account for the land-cruiser's funny, canted look, but how did you get that many flat shoes all at once? Nails in the road? A strew of glass?

  He looked at Mary, but Mary was still looking passionately up into the rearview mirror. "If we'd put that bag of dope under the tire," she was saying, "if it was ours, then why in God's name would Peter have taken the spare out so you could see it? I mean, he could have reached around the spare and gotten the toolkit, it would have been a little awkward but there was room."

  They went past the RV. The side door was closed but unlatched. The steps were down. There was a doll lying in the dirt at the foot of them. The dress it was wearing fluttered in the wind.

  Peter's eyes closed. He didn't know for sure if he had closed them or if they had closed on their own. Didn't much care. All he knew was that Officer Friendly had blown by the disabled RV as if he hadn't even seen it ... or as if he already knew all about it.

  Words from an old song, floating in his head: Somethin happenin here . . . what it is ain't exactly clear...

  "Do we impress you as stupid people?" Mary was asking as the disabled RV began to dwindle behind them--to dwindle as Deirdre's Acura had done. "Or stoned? Do you think we're--"

  "Shut up," the cop said. He spoke softly, but there was no way to miss the venom in his voice.

  Mary had been sitting forward with her fingers curled into the mesh between the front and back seats. Now her hands dropped away from it, and she turned her shocked face toward Peter. She was a faculty wife, she was a poet who had published in over twenty magazines since her first tentative submissions eight years ago, she went to a women's discussion group twice a week, she had been seriously considering piercing her nose. Peter wondered when the last time was she had been told to shut up. He wondered if anyone had ever told her to shut up.

  "What?" she asked, perhaps trying to sound aggressive, even threatening, and only sounding bewildered. "What did you tell me?"

  "I'm arresting you and your husband on a charge of possession of marijuana with intent to sell," the cop said. His voice was uninflected, robotic. Now staring forward, Peter saw there was a little plastic bear stuck to the dashboard, beside the compass and next to what was probably an LED readout for the radar sp
eed-gun. The bear was small, the size of a gumball machine prize. His neck was on a spring, and his empty painted eyes stared back at Peter.

  This is a nightmare, he thought, knowing it wasn't. It's got to be a nightmare. I know it feels real, but it's got to be.

  "You can't be serious," Mary said, but her voice was tiny and shocked. The voice of someone who knew better. Her eyes were filling up with tears again. "Surely you can't be."

  "You have the right to remain silent," the big cop said in his robot's voice. "If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?"

  She was looking at Peter, her eyes huge and horrified, asking him without speaking if he had heard what the cop had mixed in with the rest of it, that robotic voice never varying. Peter nodded. He had heard, all right. He put a hand into his crotch, sure he would feel dampness there, but he hadn't wet himself. Not yet, anyway. He put an arm around Mary and could feel her trembling. He kept thinking of the RV back there. Door ajar, dollbaby lying face-down in the dirt, too many flat tires. And then there was the dead cat Mary had seen nailed to the speed-limit sign.

  "Do you understand your rights?"

  Act normally. I don't think he has the slightest idea what he said, so act normally.

  But what was normal when you were in the back seat of a police-cruiser driven by a man who was clearly as mad as a hatter, a man who had just said he was going to kill you?

  "Do you understand your rights?" the robot voice asked him.

  Peter opened his mouth. Nothing came out but a croak.

  The cop turned his head then. His face, pinkish with sun when he had stopped them, had gone pale. His eyes were very large, seeming to bulge out of his face like marbles. He had bitten his lip, like a man trying to suppress some monstrous rage, and blood ran down his chin in a thin stream.

  "Do you understand your rights?" the cop screamed at them, head turned, bulleting blind down the deserted two-lane at better than seventy miles an hour. "Do you understand your fucking rights or not? Do you or not? Do you or not? Do you or not? Answer me, you smart New York Jew! "