“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 experience, 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 axe 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.”
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 judgment 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 him-self 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 centralNevada 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’
The trunk shut and he 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 dip shit police station, maybe in a jail cell, because your sister’s selfish and forgetful 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 minor, trying to make eye contact with him. “Half of Deirdre’s brain-cells are fried and the other half are on permanent vacation in theEmeraldCity . The technical term is ‘burnout,’ and I’m sure you ye 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 wind-shield pointed in the direction of Fallon andCarson City andLake 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-cruisers funny, canted look, but how did you get that many flats 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 minor.
“If we’d put that bag o 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 I am not exactly clear…
“Do we impress you as stupid people?” Mary was ask ing 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.