It was then that they turned to the car. I heard a door slam, a curse, and then the sound of the headlights shattering—almost a good-natured sound, celebratory, like corks popping from the necks of bottles. This was succeeded by the dull booming of the fenders, metal on metal, and then the icy crash of the windshield. I inched forward, elbows and knees, my belly pressed to the muck, thinking of guerrillas and commandos and The Naked and the Dead. I parted the weeds and squinted the length of the parking lot.
The second car—it was a Trans-Am—was still running, its high beams washing the scene in a lurid stagy light. Tire iron flailing, the greasy bad character was laying into the side of my mother’s Bel Air like an avenging demon, his shadow riding up the trunks of the trees. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp-whomp. The other two guys—blond types, in fraternity jackets—were helping out with tree branches and skull-sized boulders. One of them was gathering up bottles, rocks, muck, candy wrappers, used condoms, poptops, and other refuse and pitching it through the window on the driver’s side. I could see the fox, a white bulb behind the windshield of the ‘57 Chevy. “Bobbie,” she whined over the thumping, “come on.” The greasy character paused a moment, took one good swipe at the left taillight, and then heaved the tire iron halfway across the lake. Then he fired up the ‘57 and was gone.
Blond head nodded at blond head. One said something to the other, too low for me to catch. They were no doubt thinking that in helping to annihilate my mother’s car they’d committed a fairly rash act, and thinking too that there were three bad characters connected with that very car watching them from the woods. Perhaps other possibilities occurred to them as well—police, jail cells, justices of the peace, reparations, lawyers, irate parents, fraternal censure. Whatever they were thinking, they suddenly dropped branches, bottles, and rocks and sprang for their car in unison, as if they’d choreographed it. Five seconds. That’s all it took. The engine shrieked, the tires squealed, a cloud of dust rose from the rutted lot and then settled back on darkness.
I don’t know how long I lay there, the bad breath of decay all around me, my jacket heavy as a bear, the primordial ooze subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate my upper thighs and testicles. My jaws ached, my knee throbbed, my coccyx was on fire. I contemplated suicide, wondered if I’d need bridgework, scraped the recesses of my brain for some sort of excuse to give my parents—a tree had fallen on the car, I was blindsided by a bread truck, hit and run, vandals had got to it while we were playing chess at Digby’s. Then I thought of the dead man. He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I was: I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back. The owner of the chopper, no doubt, a bad older character come to this. Shot during a murky drug deal, drowned while drunkenly frolicking in the lake. Another headline. My car was wrecked; he was dead.
When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.
I was circling the car, as dazed and bedraggled as the sole survivor of an air blitz, when Digby and Jeff emerged from the trees behind me. Digby’s face was crosshatched with smears of dirt; Jeff’s jacket was gone and his shirt was torn across the shoulder. They slouched across the lot, looking sheepish, and silently came up beside me to gape at the ravaged automobile. No one said a word. After a while Jeff swung open the driver’s door and began to scoop the broken glass and garbage off the seat. I looked at Digby. He shrugged. “At least they didn’t slash the tires,” he said.
It was true: the tires were intact. There was no windshield, the headlights were staved in, and the body looked as if it had been sledge-hammered for a quarter a shot at the county fair, but the tires were inflated to regulation pressure. The car was drivable. In silence, all three of us bent to scrape the mud and shattered glass from the interior. I said nothing about the biker. When we were finished, I reached in my pocket for the keys, experienced a nasty stab of recollection, cursed myself, and turned to search the grass. I spotted them almost immediately, no more than five feet from the open door, glinting like jewels in the first tapering shaft of sunlight. There was no reason to get philosophical about it: I eased into the seat and turned the engine over.
It was at that precise moment that the silver Mustang with the flame decals rumbled into the lot. All three of us froze; then Digby and Jeff slid into the car and slammed the door. We watched as the Mustang rocked and bobbed across the ruts and finally jerked to a halt beside the forlorn chopper at the far end of the lot. “Let’s go,” Digby said. I hesitated, the Bel Air wheezing beneath me.
Two girls emerged from the Mustang. Tight jeans, stiletto heels, hair like frozen fur. They bent over the motorcycle, paced back and forth aimlessly, glanced once or twice at us, and then ambled over to where the reeds sprang up in a green fence round the perimeter of the lake. One of them cupped her hands to her mouth. “Al,” she called. “Hey, Al!”
“Come on,” Digby hissed. “Let’s get out of here.”
But it was too late. The second girl was picking her way across the lot, unsteady on her heels, looking up at us and then away. She was older—twenty-five or -six—and as she came closer we could see there was something wrong with her: she was stoned or drunk, lurching now and waving her arms for balance. I gripped the steering wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet, and Digby spat out my name, twice, terse and impatient.
“Hi,” the girl said.
We looked at her like zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.
She smiled, her lips cracked and dry. “Listen,” she said, bending from the waist to look in the window, “you guys seen Al?” Her pupils were pinpoints, her eyes glass. She jerked her neck. “That’s his bike over there—Al’s. You seen him?”
Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed. Digby poked me in the ribs. “We haven’t seen anybody,” I said.
The girl seemed to consider this, reaching out a slim veiny arm to brace herself against the car. “No matter,” she said, slurring the t’s, “he’ll turn up.” And then, as if she’d just taken stock of the whole scene—the ravaged car and our battered faces, the desolation of the place—she said: “Hey, you guys look like some pretty bad characters—been fightin’, huh?” We stared straight ahead, rigid as catatonics. She was fumbling in her pocket and muttering something. Finally she held out a handful of tablets in glassine wrappers: “Hey, you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah?”
I just looked at her. I thought I was going to cry. Digby broke the silence. “No thanks,” he said, leaning over me. “Some other time.”
I put the car in gear and it inched forward with a groan, shaking off pellets of glass like an old dog shedding water after a bath, heaving over the ruts on its worn springs, creeping toward the highway. There was a sheen of sun on the lake. I looked back. The girl was still standing there, watching us, her shoulders slumped, hand outstretched.
(1981)
PEACE OF MIND
First she told them the story of the family surprised over their corn muffins by the masked intruder. “He was a black man,” she said, dropping her voice and at the same time allowing a hint of tremolo to creep into it, “and he was wearing a lifelike mask of President Reagan. He just jimmied the lock and waltzed in the front door with the morning paper as if he was delivering flowers or something?
??. They thought it was a joke at first.” Giselle’s voice became hushed now, confidential, as she described how he’d brutalized the children, humiliated the wife—“Sexually, if you know what I mean”—and bound them all to the kitchen chair with twists of sheer pantyhose. Worse, she said, he drug a scratchy old copy of Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” out of the record collection and made them listen to it over and over as he looted the house. They knew he was finished when Sam and Dave choked off, the stereo rudely torn from the socket and thrown in with the rest of their things—she paused here to draw a calculated breath—“And at seven-thirty A.M., no less.”
She had them, she could see it in the way the pretty little wife’s eyes went dark with hate and the balding husband clutched fitfully at his pockets—she had them, but she poured it on anyway, flexing her verbal muscles, not yet noon and a sale, a big sale, already in the bag. So she gave them an abbreviated version of the story of the elderly lady and the overworked Mexican from the knife-sharpening service and wrung some hideous new truths from the tale of the housewife who came home to find a strange car in her garage. “A strange car?” the husband prompted, after she’d paused to level a doleful, frightened look on the wife. Giselle sighed. “Two white men met her at the door. They were in their early forties, nicely dressed, polite—she thought they were real-estate people or something. They escorted her into the house, bundled up the rugs, the paintings, the Camcorder and VCR and then took turns desecrating”—that was the term she used, it got them every time—“desecrating her naked body with the cigarette lighter from her very own car.”
The husband and wife exchanged a glance, then signed on for the whole shmeer—five thousand and some-odd dollars for the alarm system—every window, door, keyhole, and crevice wired—and sixty bucks a month for a pair of “Armed Response” signs to stick in the lawn. Giselle slid into the front seat of the Mercedes and cranked up the salsa music that made her feel as if every day was a fiesta, and then let out a long slow breath. She checked her watch and drew a circle around the next name on her list. It was a few minutes past twelve, crime was rampant, and she was feeling lucky. She tapped her foot and whistled along with the sour, jostling trumpets—no doubt about it, she’d have another sale before lunch.
The balding husband stood at the window and watched the Mercedes back out of the driveway, drift into gear, and glide soundlessly up the street. It took him a moment to realize he was still clutching his checkbook. “God, Hil,” he said (or, rather, croaked—something seemed to be wrong with his throat), “it’s a lot of money.”
The pretty little wife, Hilary, crouched frozen on the couch, legs drawn up to her chest, feet bare, toenails glistening. “They stuff your underwear in your mouth,” she whispered, “that’s the worst thing. Can you imagine that, I mean the taste of it—your own underwear?”
Ellis didn’t answer. He was thinking of the masked intruder—the maniac disguised as the President—and of his own children, whose heedless squeals of joy came to him like hosannas from the swingset out back. He’d been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they’d be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you worked for, everything you loved, had to be locked up as if you were in a castle under siege.
“I wonder what they did to her,” Hilary said.
“Who?”
“The woman—the one with the cigarette lighter. I heard they burn their initials into you.”
Yes, of course they did, he thought—why wouldn’t they? They sold crack in the elementary schools, pissed in the alleys, battered old women for their Social Security checks. They’d cleaned out Denny Davidson while he was in the Bahamas and ripped the stereo out of Phyllis Steubig’s Peugeot. And just last week they’d stolen two brand-new Ironcast aluminum garbage cans from the curb in front of the neighbors’ house—just dumped the trash in the street and drove off with them. “What do you think, Hil?” he said. “We can still get out of it.”
“I don’t care what it costs,” she murmured, her voice drained of emotion. “I won’t be able to sleep till it’s in.”
Ellis crossed the room to gaze out on the sun-dappled backyard. Mifty and Corinne were on the swings, pumping hard, lifting up into the sky and falling back again with a pure rhythmic grace that was suddenly so poignant he could feel a sob rising in his throat. “I won’t either,” he said, turning to his wife and spreading his hands as if in supplication. “We’ve got to have it.”
“Yes,” she said.
“If only for our peace of mind.”
Giselle was pretty good with directions—she had to be, in her business—but still she had to pull over three times to consult her Thomas’ Guide before she found the next address on her list. The house was in a seedy, run-down neighborhood of blasted trees, gutted cars, and tacky little houses, the kind of neighborhood that just made her blood boil—how could people live like that? she wondered, flicking off the tape in disgust. Didn’t they have any self-respect? She hit the accelerator, scattering a pack of snarling, hyenalike dogs, dodged a stained mattress and a pair of overturned trash cans and swung into the driveway of a house that looked as if it had been bombed, partially reconstructed, and then bombed again. There has to be some mistake, she thought. She glanced up and caught the eye of the man sitting on the porch next door. He was fat and shirtless, his chest and arms emblazoned with lurid tattoos, and he was in the act of lifting a beer can to his lips when he saw that she was peering at him from behind the frosted window of her car. Slowly, as if it cost him an enormous effort, he lowered the beer can and raised the middle finger of his free hand.
She rechecked her list. 7718 Picador Drive. There was no number on the house in front of her, but the house to the left was 7716 and the one to the right 7720. This was it, all right. She stepped out of the car with her briefcase, squared her shoulders, and slammed the door, all the while wondering what in god’s name the owner of a place like this would want with an alarm system. These were the sort of people who broke into houses—and here she turned to give the fat man an icy glare—not the ones who had anything to protect. But then what did she care?—a sale was a sale. She set the car alarm with a fierce snap of her wrist, waited for the reassuring bleat of response from the bowels of the car, and marched up the walk.
The man who answered the door was tall and stooped—mid-fifties, she guessed—and he looked like a scholar in his wire-rims and the dingy cardigan with the leather elbow patches. His hair was the color of freshly turned dirt and his eyes, slightly distorted and swimming behind the thick lenses, were as blue as the skies over Oklahoma. “Mr. Coles?” she said.
He looked her up and down, taking his time. “And what’re you supposed to be,” he breathed in a wheezy humorless drawl, “the Avon Lady or something?” It was then that she noticed the nervous little woman frozen in the shadows of the hallway behind him. “Everett,” the woman said in a soft, pleading tone, but the man took no notice of her. “Or don’t tell me,” he said, “you’re selling Girl Scout cookies, right?”
When it came to sales, Giselle was unshakable. She saw her opening and thrust out her hand. “Giselle Nyerges,” she said, “I’m from SecureCo? You contacted us about a home security system?”
The woman vanished. The fat man next door blew into his fist and produced a rude noise and Everett Coles, with a grin that showed too much gum, took her hand and led her into the house.
Inside, the place wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. Kmart taste, of course, furniture made of particle board, hopelessly tacky bric-a-brac, needlepoint homilies on the walls, but at least it was spare. And clean. The man led her through the living room to the open-beam kitchen and threw himself down in a chair at the Formica table. A sliding glass door gave onto the dusty expanse of the backyard. “So,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
“First I want to tell you how happy I am that you’re considering a Sec
ureCo home security system, Mr. Coles,” she said, sitting opposite him and throwing the latches on her briefcase with a professional snap. “I don’t know if you heard about it,” she said, the conspiratorial whisper creeping into her voice, “but just last week they found a couple—both retirees, on a fixed income—bludgeoned to death in their home not three blocks from here. And they’d been security-conscious too—deadbolts on the doors and safety locks on the windows. The killer was this black man—a Negro—and he was wearing a lifelike mask of President Reagan … Well, he found this croquet mallet …”
She faltered. The man was looking at her in the oddest way. Really, he was. He was grinning still—grinning as if she were telling a joke—and there was something wrong with his eyes. They seemed to be jerking back and forth in the sockets, jittering like the shiny little balls in a pinball machine. “I know it’s not a pleasant story, Mr. Coles,” she said, “but I like my customers to know that, that …” Those eyes were driving her crazy. She looked down, shuffling through the papers in her briefcase.
“They crowd you,” he said.
“Pardon?” Looking up again.
“Sons of bitches,” he growled, “they crowd you.”
She found herself gazing over his shoulder at the neat little needlepoint display on the kitchen wall: SEMPER FIDELIS; HOME SWEET HOME; BURN, BABY, BURN.
“You like?” he said.
Burn, Baby, Burn?
“Did them myself.” He dropped the grin and gazed out on nothing. “Got a lot of time on my hands.”
She felt herself slipping. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go at all. She was wondering if she should hit him with another horror story or get down to inspecting the house and writing up an estimate, when he asked if she wanted a drink.