“Mother…fucker,” the guy said in a calm but incredibly pissedoff way, and Merlot could see the cop car backing quickly from the other side of the road, and the blue lights came on before it even got fully turned around. The guy found the ashtray and put the cigar out.
“He’s pulling me over,” Merlot said. “I’ll have to pull over.”
“No. Don’t pull over.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean don’t pull over. Keep going.”
“But what if he pulls up alongside me?”
“Keep going.”
“What if he tries to shoot my tires out?”
“Keep going.”
By now the cop car was right on his tail and there was no mistaking it, the cop wanted him to pull over. It was an effort of will to keep his foot off the brake, but he was very conscious of the gun pointed at him.
The guy said: “If you pull over, I’ll shoot you.”
That made Merlot pretty indignant.
“So you’ve got it all figured out, have you? What if he tries to ram us or something?”
“Anybody ever tell you you got a big mouth?”
“Not since my old man died.”
The siren came on in the cop car behind them. Then in a straight stretch of road the cop car pulled up beside him and kept pace. A voice came over a loudspeaker: “Pull over now, sir! Pull over right now!”
“What am I gonna do?” Merlot said.
“Keep going.”
“It’s a cop! I’m supposed to stop!”
“Keep going.”
Just then the interior light came on in the cop car, and Merlot could see that it wasn’t a man driving the cop car. It was a woman, a black woman with a medium ’Fro, in a blue uniform, and she had the mike up to her mouth. He could see even from there that she was very well endowed, about like Dolly Parton was endowed.
“Pull it over!” the voice said. It was a nice voice but really loud. She was running right beside him and Merlot could have almost looked right into her eyes if he had taken them off the road for a few seconds, but he couldn’t. He tried to give her a helpless look, but he knew she wasn’t getting it. The blue lights were flashing everywhere. They lit up a frozen rabbit. They lit up a dead and frosty-tailed mule that somebody had evidently just left on the side of the road for the road guys to pick up.
“Speed up,” the guy said.
“Speed up? She’s right beside us.”
“She?”
“It’s a female cop. I can see her.”
“Oh yeah?” the guy said. “Lemme see.”
He leaned over and Merlot caught a whiff of his breath and knew it had been quite a while since this guy had bothered to floss. Whoa. He bet he didn’t have a steady girlfriend. Neither did Merlot. Candy being the way she was, it was hard to have a regular girlfriend. Or even one he could bring over, invite to stay for dinner, attempt to hump on the couch afterward.
“Roll your window down,” the guy said.
“This is the last time I’m telling you,” the voice over the loudspeaker said, pretty loudly.
Merlot pushed the button for the window, uneasy doing it, wondering why the guy wanted it down as it started coming down. But before he could think for very long about it, the guy leaned over and stuck the gun out and pulled the trigger and a window on the passenger’s side of the cruiser shattered and the cruiser swayed, squealed its tires, slid sideways, and stopped.
Merlot could see it in his side mirror, receding, sitting there, blue lights going, siren still screaming, the interior light still on, and a glimpse of the woman cop, but there was just that glimpse, and then the guy told him to roll the window back up.
Merlot did what he was told, but he was sick, sick sick sick. Oh he was sick! What’d you roll the window down for? Dumb-ass!
34
“Oh shit!” Lenny screamed. He was lying on his back on the bed. “Oh God! Oh my God!”
Anjalee raised her head and smiled a wicked smile at him, put one finger to her lips, and swung her hair back from her face briefly before lowering it again. He put another pillow behind his head.
Later they lay back on satin sheets in the plush Peabody suite that was a hell of a lot nicer than any room Frankie had ever put her in, eating nachos with melted cheese poured over them and shrimp cocktails and crackers and for her a tossed salad with pepperoni and chopped-up bits of provolone. He’d ordered up a bottle of Dom and two glasses. He didn’t watch any sports and she seemed pleased with that. It turned out they both liked Larry King, but he didn’t have anybody on worth a shit that night. CNN had taped live coverage of some crooks in the stock market getting arrested in New York and people yelling at them. It turned out that Anjalee was a long-time Zorro fan just because of Guy Williams, so they watched him and Don Diego and Sergeant Garcia and then they watched a Lucy show on Nick at Nite, the one where she was working on the candy factory assembly line and had to cram a bunch of it in her mouth when it got to going way too fast for her to keep up with it.
They got food all over the nice bed. They did it again, slowly, carefully, even lovingly. They kissed tenderly. He wondered how much she was going to charge him. He wondered if it would be more or less than what she had charged Frankie, the dumb son of a bitch. He was a hamburger by now. Or a dogburger.
Later they took showers and got dressed and went out. He had a driver for his car, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform who didn’t say a word, only drove them through Memphis and down I-55 to the exit at Senatobia where he turned off and headed for the casinos at Tunica, the bright lights of the little Vegas in the Mississippi Delta. Where even the legendary Merle had played. And he decided something on the way down. He decided he wasn’t going to say shit about what was probably left of Frankie.
35
“Well I don’t give a fuck what you think!” Helen yelled through the locked door. Then she threw some lipstick and gloss at it, lotions, creams, emollients.
36
They had stopped engines and it was hard to believe until the NBC and ABC news crews’ helicopters started arriving and landing on the flight deck, along with some Coast Guard people, and then pretty soon they were on the news itself. Wayne saw it with Henderson in the TV room, which was almost deserted, since a lot of the crew who were off duty were up on deck trying to see what was going on, and Admiral Zumo was on his way out to have a personal peek they said.
Something must have gone wrong. Somebody must have said something they shouldn’t have said or maybe when they said it somebody else misunderstood what they’d just said and maybe that was how an NBC News cameraman wound up leaning out over the edge of the flight deck unseen behind a crowd of enlisted men who just happened to be standing there with a couple of third-class petty officers holding on to his belt while he was taking unauthorized video film of the whale that had been struck by the propeller but not killed. Wallowing out there in the rolling waves, blood staining the water around it, and Wayne standing there watching it knew that America would see the blood and the whale suffering and that a great outcry would come. Hell yes. They were mammals, not fish. They bore their young alive. They didn’t bother anybody. People had soft spots in their hearts for them and would spend two days in the hot sun trying to get them back into deep water whenever they found them run aground in a pod at Cape Cod.
There were all kinds of rumors floating around the ship. Some said the prop was broken, and that they were stranded. Some said the whale had a baby, and that the baby was out there crying and swimming around its dying mother, although nothing like that had appeared on the TV screen just yet, but being in the military, they knew how the government could suppress information, at almost any time, and for almost any reason, say, something that might be sensitive, like secretly invading another country, and if there was indeed a baby whale swimming around and crying because its dying mother had been struck by an aircraft carrier from the U.S. Navy, they’d damn well want to suppress it from the general public until they could d
ecide what to do. Shit. There was no telling how long it took to decide what to do about them dead little green men they found crashed in Roswell back in ’47, is what Henderson said.
It was rumored that Peter Jennings was on the ship. It was rumored that Prince was on the ship. It was rumored that the captain had been on the line with the President, that the President was waiting for developments while playing a little golf and catching Billy Joe Shaver at the Continental Club in Austin, that something had gone wrong and some film had been released that shouldn’t have been. The President didn’t appear to be pissed yet.
Most everybody was confined belowdecks. They could go to the galley and eat, they could work or sleep or study, but they could not go up.
Things got pretty boring pretty quickly. Wayne and Henderson played cards, watched a movie, ate some sandwiches, played some dominoes, heard some more rumors, took a nap.
Then when they were back in the TV room to catch Steve Earle and Robert Cray on Sessions at West 54th, the captain gave them the straight scoop over the intercom, at 2230. Yes, it was true that the ship had hit a blue whale normally not seen in these waters, a whale that may have been sick and running a fever and whose sonar might have been subsequently impaired. Yes, the ship’s propeller had severely injured it, quite possibly critically. Yes, there was a whale calf involved, about a twenty-two-footer. The ship was stopped for an investigation, which was SOP for any collision, and since they were only three days out they would probably be going back to some port, but right now they were about to be involved with some civilians in a rescue effort for the calf. That was all. The intercom went off but then there was a long whining fuzzy buzz with enough feedback to where they thought maybe Neil Young was onboard with his electric guitar and wahwah pedal, about to come over the loudspeakers with “Mother Earth.”
“Sheeeit, Wayne,” Henderson said, turning back to the television and reaching into a big bag for some more Fritos. “We ain’t never gonna get to the Sea of Arabia messin’ with this whale shit.”
37
Merlot went nuts from fear when the guy tried to light his cigar again. Sick! The guy took his eyes off him for just a few seconds to fumble around at the bottom of the dash for the lighter, and in that small window of opportunity, thinking about what the butcher guy might have done to the innocent lady cop, and what he might do to him later, he jammed both feet on the brakes, grabbed the gun, and elbowed the guy in the teeth as hard as he could. Sick! And since grabbing the gun scared the living shit out of him, and was like something he had never done before in his whole life, and since he was seized by adrenaline and given extra-normal strength from those two weird little organs coming off the top of his kidneys, he held the gun with one hand while it fired one round through the windshield post BOOM! and another one through the windshield, which spiderwebbed BLAM!, and another one right through his new Pioneer CD player with Bass Booster BAM! and caught the guy by the thick hair on the back of his head that was sticking out from under the knitted cap with the other hand, and slammed his face and the cigar into the windshield. It went KaPLOW!, and some books fell off the dash, and the guy kind of rolled his eyes, then crossed his eyes, but Merlot was still plenty revved up on the adrenaline rush, so he slammed his face again, not even noticing that the van had stopped by then, or that the cigar was getting smashed all over the place, or that books were getting scattered everywhere, and just kept on slamming his head kind of hysterically and heaving since he was still so scared.
The door jerked open. There was a blinding light in his eyes.
“Don’t move!”
Merlot didn’t move. The voice sounded familiar.
“Hands in the air!”
It sounded like the lady cop. But the light was so bright he couldn’t see. Son of a bitch! It was like the landing-gear light on one of those 767s! Coming straight in for you! The problem was that his left hand was still holding the gun and his right hand was holding the guy by the back of the head and he didn’t want to drop the gun and maybe risk it going off or drop the guy and maybe have him come back to life. Or her.
“I can’t put my hands up,” he said.
“Why not?” the voice said. He knew it was the lady cop now but he couldn’t see her. He felt like he was getting permanent eyeball damage.
“This guy tried to carjack me,” he said. “Are you all right?”
The light in his eyes was turned off. He had to blink a few times. He saw her then. It wasn’t a ’Fro after all. She had rounded black hair that was sheened and formed around her face and the sides of her head like a bowling ball. She had large wet doe eyes and full smoochy-looking lips and a broad but graceful nose. She was about ten pounds overweight and she was about the sexiest thing he had ever seen. And she was locked and loaded on him over the muzzle of a big revolver, both her hands steady on the grip. Then he noticed that the very tip of the muzzle, the part where the front sight was mounted, was wavering the tiniest bit. Death lay waiting in that little black hole, too.
“I can’t turn loose,” Merlot said.
She lowered the gun and stepped closer. She grabbed her flashlight again from her pocket and shone the beam on the guy.
“He carjacked me,” Merlot said again. “He pulled this gun on me when I pulled over.”
She didn’t say anything. Merlot kept looking at her and holding the gun with one hand and the guy’s hair with the other. He thought he was out.
“I think he’s out,” Merlot said. “I slammed his face a few times. You sure you’re all right?”
“Give me the gun,” she said. “Is the safety off?”
“I don’t know,” Merlot said. “Has it got a safety? I don’t know anything about guns except I’m scared of them.”
She stood there for a moment and seemed to be trying to make up her mind. Then she put the flashlight and the gun away.
“I’m not the bad guy here, ma’am. I’m just making a citizen’s arrest.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Merlot Jones,” Merlot said. “I teach out at Ole Miss.”
“All right. Give me the gun. Be careful with it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Merlot turned loose of the guy’s hair and the guy’s head slumped over on him. His nose was bleeding and some of the skin was busted over one of his eyes and he had bits of smashed tobacco all over his mouth and chin and the blood was getting on his clothes.
He pulled the guy’s limp fingers out of the gun and it didn’t go off. Thank God. He was trying to be really careful with it. He was pretty scared just holding it and his hands were shaking now from thinking about what he’d just done.
“My hands are shaking,” he said. “Can’t help it.”
“I can see that,” she said. “Be careful. Here.”
He handed it to her with it pointing away from her and she took it. She expertly jacked it open and ejected the live shell, where it spun in a bright brass arc and clattered to the road and rolled and then stopped. She pulled something from the handle and stuck it in her pocket, and put the gun in her other pocket. She seemed to know a lot about guns.
“I’m coming around to the other side,” she said. “Don’t move.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He watched her go in front of the windshield and thought she could easily be a model for one of those large-ladies’ lingerie catalogs like Erma or whatever her name was, the kind he liked to look at. He liked some meat on a woman’s bones. A big woman was extra warmth in the winter.
The other door opened. She didn’t look at him. She took hold of the guy who was bleeding, and pulled him up, and looked into his face.
“You grabbed the gun and did this, too?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You know you got a headlight out?”
Merlot nodded, looking into her eyes, which seemed to be getting bigger the more he looked, knowing he’d yearned for something all his life, and knowing now that it was her face. He suddenly had a crazy thought. He wondered if
maybe she’d like to go home with him sometime and meet Candy.
38
There was a huge sycamore in Mr. Hamburger’s fenced-in backyard and in it was a nest that had been painstakingly built from leaves over a period of two months by an old white-nosed fox squirrel that lived in the neighborhood and scampered across power lines and traveled from yard to yard and raised some cute babies once in a while. The nest was about three feet out and two feet down from the edge of the roof, and Miss Muffett had seen the mama squirrel on the roof a number of times, but it had never gotten into the attic to tear up newspapers or race around up there on the insulation or gnaw the insulation off the electrical wires the way squirrels sometimes did as far as she knew, so she was cool with it, long as it didn’t bother her, she wasn’t going to bother it. But there was a little more to it than just that.