‘Something happened,’ she says.
‘Something happened?’
‘Uh huh.’
Tommy admires his girl, bow tie loosened and white button-down stained with signature sauce, red as arterial blood. She’s been waiting tables at the Italian chain between the nail salon and the headshop. Tonight she told him to meet her just off the interstate but wouldn’t say why over the phone. She smells like a garlic knot.
‘Something bad.’
‘Alright, out with it.’
‘It’s very bad, Tommy.’
‘Whatever it is, we’ll handle it.’
Tommy lifts his sleeve as a reminder that her name is stenciled across his bicep in a gothic script. Not her name – Nina – but the words ‘her name’, the result of a drunken miscommunication. Nina loves the tattoo nonetheless.
They walk to where her car is parked on the road’s shoulder. This part of the interstate is dark, flanked by woods. The occasional semi truck illuminates light-sensitive signs for rest stops. On his trek here from town, Tommy counted twenty-eight deer.
She stares at the trunk.
‘Don’t freak out.’
‘Did you hit a deer?’
‘Promise you won’t freak out.’
‘I promise.’
‘Pinky promise.’
They lock hands. She lifts the trunk. Tommy’s pupils swallow his irises, a little island absorbing a little sea.
‘Oh, fucking Christ!’
‘You promised!’
‘Is he dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why’d you put your jacket over him?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘How’d you even get him in there?’
‘I lifted him.’
‘Like hell.’
‘I carry dishes all day, you know. Builds upper body strength.’
Tommy closes the trunk and puts his head in his hands.
‘Did anyone see you?’
‘No,’ says Nina. She describes the scene. Her routine commute home from the restaurant, the figure careening into her headlights. How she’d called out for help but was in that dead stretch of nature where no one walks or jogs or hitchhikes for there is no sidewalk on which to walk or jog or hitchhike. No one really walks or jogs at this hour anyhow.
‘Am I going to hell?’ she asks.
‘No. Whoever gave you a license might be.’
She starts to cry.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.’
Tommy puts his arm around her. The cicadas are in concert with the oil refinery tonight.
‘Maybe,’ says Tommy, ‘maybe he was a really bad guy, you know? With a penchant for violence. Against women and children. Sick, unspeakable stuff. And maybe he was crossing the road to go do violence to women and children when you came along and –’ Tommy smacks his hands together. ‘So you actually did a public service.’
‘Maybe,’ she says feebly, ‘or maybe he’s a private equity manager named Nelson Lang.’
‘That’s specific.’
Nina rummages in her pocket and produces a faded brown wallet. From it she pulls an ID and a business card:
nelson lang
private equity management
‘Well, you can work in private equity and have a penchant for violence. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.’
‘We should go to the police.’
‘Let’s think about that for a second.’
‘It was an accident.’
‘I just don’t think that’ll hold up in court.’
‘This is traumatic for me, too. How do you think I feel?’
‘How do you think the iceberg felt after the Titanic?’
‘That analogy doesn’t really –’
‘All I mean is that jail is not an environment in which I see you thriving.’
She’s crying again and he’s comforting her, then kissing her. Adrenalin a short pipeline to arousal. The wind sounds like a buzzsaw.
From the trunk, there comes a faint knocking. Timid, like an apprehensive solicitor.
The phrase lost her father seems off to Jo-Anna because she knows exactly where he is. He is at the Elmwood Cemetery and, before that, he was in his recliner, hooked up to a bevy of chirping medical appliances. Her father was her best friend. She’d come over after her secretarial job each evening to chat, and when he could no longer chat, to watch an hour of his favorite program in which a prominent scientist and a prominent religious figure are put into dire survival scenarios. ‘Jiggly Jo,’ her father would say, ‘my little lump.’ And she’d change this or that tube, descending from his nose like stalactites. Her evenings have become so expansive since his passing. She sits behind the front desk nibbling her vending machine snack du jour until the sun sets beyond the hills, then waits for the evening bus home.
She likes being alone. She spent her teens alone, mostly. The kids used to joke that Jo-Anna was the last in their high school to keep her hyphen intact. She’d once heard that your time spent alone is pivotal, preparing you for the times when you are not. The times when you are a partner or a parent. Once, at the office’s non-denominational holiday celebration, an intoxicated senior manager kissed her on the mouth. It was more of a collision than a kiss, teeth knocking awkwardly while his wife visited the buffet. He also grabbed her ass and said, ‘there’s enough of you to go around, huh?’ Though she understands that the prevailing conditions of twenty-first century America allow for her to object to this, she doesn’t.
Jo-Anna lives in a basement apartment, and when people walk above, drywall sprinkles down on her. She took three days of bereavement after her father passed. When she returns to the office it is as though nothing has happened at all.
One of the managers, a quiet man who keeps to himself, a man who does not attend the non-denominational holiday parties, the company barbeques, blood drives, charity marathons or comedy nights, approaches her desk.
‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ says Nelson.
‘In the past tense?’
She is thorough in a way that is off putting to people. It makes for a good secretary, not a good conversationalist. But Nelson smiles.
‘I am sorry. Were you close?’
‘He was my best friend.’
‘My condolences,’ he says and returns to his office.
Jo-Anna watches him after that. She watches Nelson conduct his business respectfully. He is honest with his clients and helps them make safe, responsible investments. He is cordial but doesn’t linger in office socializing. His desk does not sport a single personal touch; no bobbleheads or family photos, no books, candles or mugs. He does not wear headphones but once during a shared elevator ride she caught him nodding along to the muzak pumped in by the building. He is a man of few words and few earthly pleasures and for this Jo-Anna loves him.
She loves him more each day. While Nelson is polite to Jo-Anna she sees other members of the office get together. Share lunch hours. She overhears plans being made to meet at the local pub after work. No one asks her to meet at the local pub after work. She takes a specialized business class online and applies to an open CPA position at the company. Another girl, a junior accountant, is chosen for the job. The office throws her a little party in the break room with a cake and a bubbling drink that resembles champagne but does not contain alcohol. Jo-Anna pilfers the remainder of the cake from the refrigerator, takes it home with her and eats it in her father’s recliner which she has moved into her apartment. She does not mean to eat the whole thing. ‘Little lump,’ she thinks.
One day it rains heavily and the gutters overflow. People run from the office to their cars holding newspapers over their heads. Jo-Anna sits at her bus stop and shivers. She has heard that chickens can drown in the rain simply by looking up. A car pulls over and Nelson lowers the passenger window.
‘Can I give you a lift home?’
‘I wouldn’t want to put you out.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
In the warmth of Nelson’s car, Jo-Anna is unable to speak, cannot will the function, as though her mouth were a wound that has long since healed. So they’re quiet save for a few left here’s and right at the lights which stretch the limits of her communication. The rain is violent, on the windshield like a machine-gun spit. Nelson’s car is as austere as his desk. No hula girls, no fuzzy dice.
‘Are you close with your father,’ she finds herself saying, apropos of nothing, barely intelligible in the storm.
‘Never knew him,’ says Nelson.
‘That’s a shame,’ says Jo-Anna.
‘Do you like being a secretary?’ asks Nelson.
‘Yes,’ says Jo-Anna, ‘but my real interest lies in bookkeeping.’
‘Then that is what you should pursue.’
She shakes her head.
‘Why not?’
‘They didn’t give me the accountant position.’
‘It’s their loss,’ says Nelson. ‘Pearls before swine.’
Jo-Anna smiles. She was right about Nelson. He’s quick and, despite their different castes in the corporate structure, he’s kind. He’s a little off but so is she. And there’s a moment there in the rain that feels as though something might happen between them, the sustained eye contact, their breath mingling in the confined space. Maybe she doesn’t have to be alone. And maybe she’s ready to open her life to another. He could come in for some tea, and they could get to talking, really talking, the kind of conversation that bonds people in an enduring way, that mends two fissured souls, and with their souls mended she’d ask him to spend the night on the couch because it’s really coming down out there and he’d decline and she’d insist and he’d relent and they’d talk further and he’d admit that, in fact, he has had a thing for Jo-Anna all these years and she would reveal that his feelings are reciprocated and they’d laugh and he’d say well how about that and this is the story they’d tell the next generation of Jo-Annas and Nelsons, the story of two pearls in a private equity firm. And she’s about to offer to do Nelson’s taxes when the car comes to a gentle halt before her apartment and Nelson looks at her, patently but expectantly, to exit the vehicle. She thanks him for the ride and goes inside, where she’s dusted with ceiling as she weeps atop her mattress.
Two police officers relax on the sofa. Their wives tidy the kitchen. A roast has been picked to the bone. A wine decanted. Their time serving on the same force now feels like a lifetime ago now. The younger sergeant gesticulates wildly as he speaks to the older lieutenant.
‘And you’d usually survive that sorta thing but because of the nature of the injury, the way the fork went in, it hit some artery or other and, well, that’s all she wrote.’
He articulates blood spray by balling and quickly opening his hand.
‘What a way to go,’ says the lieutenant. ‘I don’t even have cuffs on me. They give us tactical zip ties.’
‘It’s been non-stop lately.’
‘Have you ever been cuffed with a tactical zip tie? It’s un-fucking-pleasant.’
‘Just yesterday we get a domestic disturbance call. This couple living up on the twenty-eighth floor and the girl takes the quicker way down. Guy swears she jumps.’
‘They never jump.’
‘Nosiree Bob.’
‘I have two rules for interrogating,’ says the lieutenant. ‘One: never give out all the information.’
A pause.
The sergeant snorts.
The lieutenant feels the distinct prick of jealousy. He too was once full of pluck and guile, a fire raging inside, but he grew older, slower, more sentimental, and has been sent out to pasture. Now, he rarely gives more than a parking ticket. His own internal fire couldn’t light a tea candle. He has taken to compiling his accounts from the force into a memoir, a draft of which he shows to the younger sergeant who squints at the print.
‘Hoo-wee, you got some four-dollar words in here.’
‘Do you think the fire motif is too heavy handed?’
‘No, no, but hey, any time you want to come back, stop writing and start living,’ says the sergeant, ‘there’s a squad car with your name on it.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘It’s a figure of speech, it wouldn’t really have your name –’
‘I like the pace out here.’
The lieutenant does not, in fact, like the pace out here. It’s the pace of a lazy river. He’s antsy. His wife feels it too, this cabin fever. She keeps having bake sales for increasingly rare diseases and spending the money on esoteric exercise classes. His wife knows more about the martial arts than him, could likely defeat him in combat. These days, who couldn’t?
The lieutenant offers the sergeant another drink. It’s declined. The sergeant has that long drive home. But it’s been good catching up, they should do it again soon. The wives so enjoy it, we do it all for them, etc. etc. Is there pity in the sergeant’s parting glance?
The lieutenant takes his drink to the porch. His career’s bathetic conclusion has made it difficult to end the memoir. He is grateful to never have been seriously injured while serving but, when it comes to the culmination of his duties, he’d have preferred a bang to a whimper. That night he lies awake in bed scrounging for an ending. His wife fights in her sleep.
This restlessness continues into the next day which the lieutenant spends on aimless patrol. He never knows how to orient himself in the town for optimal idling. He does not want to sit too near the park for fear of interacting with the local youth or faith-based groups. Nor in front of local businesses. Policemen have fallen from public favor since his day and his presence discourages customers. So he drives on, until roused from his stupor by a burst of static.
‘You read?’ says the radio.
‘10-2.’
He pulls over, throws on his park-anywhere lights.
His wife texts asking what he’d like for dinner.
‘Uh,’ says the radio. ‘Something happened.’
The lieutenant straightens. Kills the air conditioning. Leans in close to await further detail. His wife texts that she’s making a puttanesca.
‘I think you’d better get over here,’ says the radio.
The lieutenant drives to the provided address, a little house secluded in the woods. His heart is making a valiant effort against his breastplate. Hands jittery, he fiddles with the stubborn parking brake. A trooper is waiting outside the house. The curtains are drawn.
‘Hikers heard noises,’ says the trooper, ‘so I, well, go and see for yourself.’
The lieutenant approaches the front door into which the trooper has already broken. He feels for the release tab on his holster. It’s quiet. No birds. Even the insects are holding their breath. The house is furnished minimally, a little musty, and pierced with beams of afternoon light. There is no art, no charm, no personal touches, no signs of life. Papers are stacked and organized neatly on a desk. The lieutenant follows the muddied footprints of the trooper deeper into the property. The hallway is dark and he removes his sunglasses to let his eyes adjust before proceeding. His eyes are wet and gentle, but some fire in them yet. He stops before a little door beneath the stairs. Hand at his side. Whole body clenched. He pulls it open with the innate logic that something painful should be done quickly, and lets forth an inaudible gasp.
‘There are real sick people out there,’ says the trooper.
Behind the little door; the ending to his memoir. A bestseller.
Nelson wakes with a very bad head injury. He shrugs off what seems to be a women’s jacket and assesses his surroundings. A hatchback. Bleary, he can make out bickering voices from beyond the trunk’s confines. A male and a female. Now this one’s a puzzler. Think, Nelson. What happened that day? He’s in his church attire, all soiled and bloodied, which means it is Sunday which means, after church, Nelson would have been doing his special activity. Beyond that, he draws a blank. He contorts himself to pat his pocket where his keys remain but his wallet has vanished. He’s parched. The sensation of crying sets in but no tears fall. Like a newborn. Another flash of memory comes. The rotating lights and beacons, red and blue. When he returned from church that afternoon, police were casing his house. They must have discovered his special activity. That’s right. He’d retreated into the woods to avoid conflict. We must avoid conflict at all costs, his mother refrained. He’d waited until nightfall, traipsing down footpaths and over root systems into the anonymity of the wilderness. Tired and dehydrated. He finally thought he’d try his luck with civilization, if only for some water, and made his way back to the road, staggered out of the tree cover and into the splintering headlights.
He knocks weakly from within the trunk. The voices stop abruptly. After a moment, it opens.
‘He’s alive,’ says the male.
‘Thank God,’ says the female.
‘If he’s alive, he can sue,’ says the male through clenched teeth.
Still gnarled, supine in the trunk bed, Nelson displays calmness by touching opposite fingertips together, something he does when working with finicky clients.
‘Could I have my wallet,’ says Nelson.
‘I am so sorry,’ says the female. ‘Jesus.’
‘Really sorry, man,’ says the male.
‘The roads are so dark out here,’ says the female.
‘Really dark,’ says the male.
‘No harm done,’ says Nelson. ‘I’ll just be on my way now.’
The male and the female look at one another.
‘I won’t mention the events of this evening to anyone,’ Nelson assures.
‘Really?’ says the male.
‘Really,’ says Nelson.
‘Pinky promise?’ says the female.
Nelson and the female join hands, an NDA of the flesh, and he heaves himself from the trunk. Pain shoots down his spine. The female hands Nelson his wallet.
‘You sure you don’t want my insurance or anything?’ says the female.
The male elbows her.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ says Nelson.
‘Or like, medical attention?’ says the female.
‘Nina,’ says the male. ‘He says he’s good.’
The couple hop into the car and speed away. Without the headlights the darkness is abrasive. Nelson feels his way to the roadside and hobbles towards town. The pilgrimage is grueling and one by one his wounds reveal themselves. Rather than a comprehensive pain, isolated areas of injury pulse and throb. He bolsters himself on telephone poles. Town is unwelcoming at this hour. Even the local pub is long closed. Hope wanes with strength. There’s comfort in giving up. Then, a familiar side street. He limps past a row of squat brick apartment buildings, and uses his last reserve of energy to knock on the door of a basement unit. It takes a few moments for its resident to rouse and answer.
‘Nelson?’ says Jo-Anna. ‘What’s happened to you?’
Inside, Jo-Anna tends his wounds. She’s quiet and makes quick work of them, dabbing and wrapping and clicking her tongue in disapproval. Nelson cannot get enough water. He lets it run down his cheeks.
‘And they just left you for dead?’ she repeats.
‘There are sick people out there,’ Nelson tells her.
‘Shouldn’t we go to the police? The hospital?’
‘I think I just need to get some rest.’
‘I can’t possibly let you go home like this.’
He puts up the formality of protest but eventually, graciously, accepts her offer to stay over. It is late, he is hurt, etc. etc. His host seems truly elated by his compliance, every emotion broadcast across her plump face. For a moment, he imagines performing his special activity on her. Instead he showers in her small bathroom and collapses into her bed. As she fusses with the covers, he notices her hands shaking.
‘Won’t you lay down with me for a minute?’ he asks her.
Nelson fears he’s offended the secretary when she starts to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘No,’ she says, ‘I would like that very, very much.’
Image © Eduardo Soares
