The cop stared right and left, his gun held up to shoulder height with the muzzle pointing at the cloudless morning sky. Then he actually turned in a circle. When he was facing the RV again, he looked directly into the outside rearview, seeming to meet Ralph’s eyes. The cop raised both hands over his head, brought them down violently, then raised and brought them down again. The pantomime was impossible to misinterpret—Stay inside, stay where you are.
“Ellie, lock the back doors.” Ralph banged down the button beside him as he spoke.
David, who was watching him, did the same thing on his side of the car without having to be asked.
“What?” She looked at him uncertainly. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but there’s a cop back there and he looks excited.” Back where I had the flat, he thought, then amended that. The flats.
The cop bent and picked something up off the surface of the road. It was a meshy strip with little twinkles of light bouncing off it the way light bounces off the sequins on a woman’s evening dress. He
carried it back to his car, dragging one end along the shoulder, his gun still in his other hand, still held up at a kind of port arms. He seemed to be trying to look in all directions at once.
Ellie locked the aft door and the main cabin door, then came forward again. “What in the Sam-hill is going on?”
“I told you, I don’t know. But that doesn’t look, you know, real encouraging.” He pointed into the mirror out-side the driver’s window.
Ellie bent, planting her hands just above her knees and watching with Ralph as the cop dumped the meshy thing into the passenger seat, then backed around to the driver’s side with his gun now held up in both hands. Later it would occur to Ralph just how carefully crafted this little silent movie had been.
Kirstie came up behind ‘her mother and began to bop Melissa Sweetheart softly against her mother’s stuck-out bottom. “Butt, butt, butt, butt,” she sang. “We love a great big motherbutt.”
“Don’t, Kirstie.”
Ordinarily Kirstie would have needed two or three requests to cease and desist, but something in her mother’s voice this time caused her to stop at once. She looked at her brother, who was staring as intently into his mirror as the grownups were into Daddy’s. She went over to him and tried to get in his lap. David set her back on her feet gently but firmly. “Not now, Pie.”
“But what is it? What’s the big deal?”
“Nothing, no big deal,” David said, never taking his eyes off the mirror.
The cop got into his cruiser and drove up the road to the Wayfarer. He got out again, his gun still out but now held along his leg with the muzzle pointed at the road. He looked right and left again, then walked over to Ralph’s window. The driver’s position in the Wayfarer was much higher than a car’s seat would have been, but the cop was so tall— six-seven, at least—that he was still able to look down on Ralph as he sat behind the wheel in his captain’s chair.
The cop made a cranking gesture with his empty hand. Ralph rolled his window halfway down. “What’s the trouble, Officer?”
“How many are you?” the cop asked.
“What’s wr—”
“Sir, how many are you?”
“Four,” Ralph said, beginning to feel really frightened now. “My wife, my two kids, me.
We have a couple of flats—”
“No, sir, all your tires are flat. You ran over a piece of highway carpet.”
“I don’t—”
“It’s a strip of mesh embedded with hundreds of short nails,” the cop said. “We use it to stop speeders whenever we can—it beats the hell out of hot pursuit.”
“What was a thing like that doing in the road?” Ellie asked indignantly.
The cop said, “I’m going to open the rear door of my car, the one closest to your RV.
When you see that, I want you to exit your vehicle and get into the back of mine. And quickly.”
He craned his neck, saw Kirsten—she was now holding onto her mother’s leg and peering cautiously around it— and gave her a smile. “Hi, girly-o.”
Kirstie smiled back at him.
The cop shifted his eyes briefly to David. He nodded,
and David nodded back noncommittally. “Who’s out there, sir?” David asked.
“A bad guy,” the cop said. “That’s all you need to know for now, son. A very bad guy.
Takr’
“Officer—” Ralph began.
“Sir, with all due respect, I feel like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. There’s a dangerous man out here he’s good with a rifle, and that piece of highway carpet suggests he’s nearby. Further discussion of the situation must wait until our position has been improved, do you understand?”
Tak? Ralph wondered. Was that the bad guy’s name9 “Yes, but—”
“You first, sir. Carry your little girl. The boy next Your wife last. You’ll have to cram, but you can all fit into the car.”
Ralph unbelted and stood up. “Where are we going” he asked.
“Desperation. Mining town. Eight miles or so from here.”
Ralph nodded, rolled up his window, then picked up Kirsten. She looked at him with troubled eyes that were not far from tears.
“Daddy, is it Mr. Big Boogeyman?” she asked. Mr. Big Boogeyman was a monster she had brought home from school one day. Ralph didn’t know which of the kids had described this shadowy closet-dweller to his gentle seven- r year-old daughter, but he thought if he could have found him (he simply assumed it was a boy, it seemed to him that the care and feeding of the monsters in the school-yards of America always fell to the boys), he would have cheerfully strangled the bugger. It had taken two months to get Kirstie more or less soothed down about Mr. Big Boogeyman. Now this.
“No, not Mr. Big Boogeyman,” Ralph said. “Probably just a postal worker having a bad day.”
“Daddy, you work for the post office,” she said as he carried her back toward the door in the middle of the Wayfarer’s cabin.
“Yup,” he said, aware that Ellie had put David in front of her and was walking with her hands on his shoulders. “It’s sort of a joke, see?”
“Like a knock-knock without the knocking?”
“Yup,” he said again. He looked out the window in the RV’s cabin door and saw the cop had opened the back door of the police cruiser. He also saw that when he opened the Wayfarer’s door, it would overlap the car door, making a protective wall. That was good.
Sure. Unless the desert rat this guy’s looking for is in back of us. Christ Almighty, why couldn’t we have gone toAtlantic City ?
“Dad?” That was David, his intelligent but slightly peculiar son who had started going to church last fall, after the thing that had happened to his friend Brian. Not Sunday school, not Thursday Night Youth Group, just church. And Sunday afternoons at the parsonage, talking with his new friend, the Rev. Who, by the way, was going to die slowly if he had been sharing anything with David but his thoughts.
According to David it was all talk, and after the thing with Brian, Ralph supposed the kid needed someone to talk to. He only wished David had felt able to bring his questions to his mother and father
instead of to some holy Joe outsider who was married but still might— “Dad? Is it all right?”
“Yes. Fine.” He didn’t know if it was or not, didn’t really know what they were dealing with here, but that was what you said to your kids, wasn’t it? Yes, fine, all right. He thought that if he were on a plane with David and the engines quit, he’d put his arm around the boy and tell him everything was fine all the way down.
He opened the door, and it banged against the inside of the cruiser door.
“Quick, come on, let’s see some hustle,” the cop said, looking nervously around.
Ralph went down the steps with Kirstie sitting in the crook of his left arm. As he stepped down, she dropped her doll.
“Melissa!” she cried. “I dropped Melissa Sweetheart, get her, Daddy!”
“No, get in the car, get in the car!” the cop shouted. “I’ll get the doll!”
Ralph slid in, putting his hand on the top of Kirstie’s head and helping her duck. David followed him, then Ellie. The back seat of the car was filled with papers, and the front seat had been warped into a bell-shape by the oversized cop’s weight. The moment Ellie pulled her right leg in, the cop slammed the door shut and went racing around the back of the cruiser.
‘Lissa!” Kirstie cried in tones of real agony. “He forgot ‘Lissa!”