Hot Springs (8 page)

“Nah. It’s OK. I’m going to get me some pussy, then turn myself in. I’d just as soon do it that way. But first off is the pussy. I figure even if she don’t love me no more, she still owes me a little, returning soldier boy and all. Hey, you want to see something?” He fumbled in his pants pocket and brought out a small book. “It’s a pocket Koran,” he said. “I got it right off a dead one of theirs. They think the bullets will just swerve and go around them if they carry it, but I guess they’re wrong about that.” He checked his watch. “She gets off work just about now, I gotta bust on over there.” Unsteadily, he made his way out the door.

“You hear any of that?” Landis asked Robin, after he’d taken his seat again at the bar.

“Not so much. I thought of something, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something to ask you.”

“OK, shoot.”

“You want to go to a party later?”

“You serious?”

“Maybe, maybe not. You want to go?”

Landis thought about what he had to do later, which was to call Bernice and to finish up at the trailer. He figured it could all wait another day. He was liking being back in town, unencumbered by the weight of Bernice’s plans. He looked again at Robin’s blue-green arms. “Where at?”

“Manitou. Some friends of mine are having a barbecue.”

“All right,” he said.

She got a pen off the register and wrote down an address on a napkin for him. “The guy’s name is Leroy—that’s whose house it is. I’m heading over around eight or so.”

Landis put the napkin in his pocket. Then he felt he was supposed to leave—if he didn’t, he was going to have to talk to this woman more, and he already felt guilty. But he hadn’t done anything, and he wasn’t about to.
Bernice
, he reminded himself.
Bernice
.

“Tab?” Robin asked.

He nodded and got out his wallet.

He knew it was a dumb idea, but when he got back to his truck, he decided to drive by the Hardings’ house. They lived at the north edge of town, practically on the air force academy’s grounds, in tight
against the mountains. One afternoon, he and Bernice had gone up to spy on the house, parking a few streets away and entering the academy grounds though a rusty gate behind a water tower. They’d hiked up a good half hour before finding a trail that headed south and around the ridge to where they’d have a view, and eventually they’d found an enormous boulder from which they could see down onto much of the development housing that crept up in neat, curved streets lined with huge, expensive homes.

“There,” she’d said. “That one.”

“What now?” he’d asked. She wriggled out of her jeans and kissed him. He took a deep breath of the thin air and felt strangely disconnected, like a dirigible, floating. They arranged their clothes on the rock and lay on them, and he was on top of her and inside her within moments. She stared up at him and started to shiver uncontrollably, even though it was probably eighty in that sun. He tried not to think about why else they were there. Her eyes looked like they’d been painted onto her face.

Now, he directed his truck into the upper reaches of the city, felt the change in elevation as the housing around him grew nicer and more expensive. Three-car garages instead of two. Bigger decks. Bigger cathedral entranceways. They still all looked like they’d been put together out of kits, though, as if a toy train might come humming through at any moment. When he’d been with Cecil Wormsley, Movers, he’d seen the inside of lots of houses. He’d liked that job for just that reason—he’d gotten to see how other people lived, or at least a kind of reduction of how they lived, the boxed-up version. What had interested him about the process of moving was the uncovering: huge dust bunnies under the furniture, the lost items miraculously returned, and, if the people were smokers, the way the nicotine-yellowed paint on the walls suddenly became apparent when you took
down the pictures. Once, they’d moved a man in his fifties out of a big modern house in an expensive development to an ugly bungalow downtown, where most of the nice stuff he had barely even fit. “Divorce,” the guy had said, slipping Landis a twenty at the end of the day. “The great leveler.” Landis had nodded in sympathy. Some years earlier, he has ducked out on his girlfriend Pam, after she’d messed herself up in a car crash, and stories of other people’s breakups interested him. Landis had hurt his back moving a desk that day, and after some subsequent discussion about doctors’ bills and lawyers, Cecil had given Landis a thousand bucks and told him he never wanted to see him again.

There were no signs of life at the Hardings’ house—the garage doors were shut, the curtains in the windows drawn. He pulled up in front of the next house on the street and idled, thinking about what he might say to them, how he might undo this whole business. The house had an enormous driveway, a hedge along one side of it with yellow and purple flowers blooming. There were flowers, too, in the tiny front yard. If you went around the side, there was a back entrance, which was the one they’d used last week.

A police car cruised slowly over the crest of the hill and drove past him. Landis watched in his rearview mirror until it was gone, then pulled away from the curb and proceeded down the hill in the direction from which it had come, making sure to stay at twenty miles per hour. He was an idiot who made terrible choices. That’s all there was to it. If they got him, it would be his own fault, pure and simple.

When he came to the next intersection, he wasn’t sure which way to go, so he turned right. He passed a development called Stone Ridge, then another called Cragg’s Landing. From behind a tall red-wood fence, an invisible dog barked.

There was a church on the left, a big, glassy construction, sparkling in the late-day sun, the sky the color of wheat straw behind it, the lights of the city just starting to come on now. He pulled over here, too, and watched the traffic on I-25 as it crept along, ants in mindless procession, yet each car occupied by bona fide consumers, who bought Doritos and Cokes and Marlboros and televisions to watch crime shows on, their car trunks laden with things they’d probably picked up at the outlet mall in Castle Rock, their brains full of junk mail.

An alien spaceship sent a force field of light and sound through him and he shuddered right down to his balls. He turned as he heard the door of the police car open, heard the scrape of shoes on the gravel.

“What’s up?” he said. “I couldn’t have been speeding.”

The officer, eyes obscured behind mirrored sunglasses, pursed his lips. “I was just kind of wondering what you’re doing here.”

“Looking at the view?”

“I saw you a few minutes ago, too, up there.” He waved off to his left. “You lost?”

“No, sir.”

“Got friends around here?”

“Nope. I’m just looking around, that’s all.” He tried hard to think of something that might explain his presence more adequately. “I’m checking out neighborhoods—my wife and I have a five-year-old. You know anything about the school district here?”

The officer looked at Landis, then at his truck, an F-150 with a fair bit of wear on it and a cracked windshield. “Not much. I live in Security. Got a five-year-old, myself.”

“Girl?”

He shook his head. “Boy. Gonna play for the Broncos. Told me that just this morning.”

“Hey, Security, that’s pretty good,” Landis said. “I mean, for a policeman.”

“Yeah, we joke about it, me and the wife. Yours a girl?”

“That’s right. We live up in Monument.” He’d once gotten stuck in an ice storm in Monument. He hoped the cop wasn’t going to ask for ID.

“How do you like that?”

“Not so bad.”

“You get the weather, huh?”

“I like the weather.”

“Not me.” He was probably a year or two younger than Landis, and he looked hard, like a guy who spit-shined his shoes in the morning and shit in neat, identical cylinders. Landis realized that there was a “secret” fraternity of fathers out there in which he now held at least a temporary membership. “I don’t need it. Weather is bad news for a cop. Accidents. That’s all I know when I see on the news that a storm’s coming.”

“Any idea what one of these places might go for?” Landis asked.

“Nope. But I’m sure you’ll be happy. Nice and quiet up here. You got the mountains, after all. There has been some trouble with bears getting into people’s trash. That’s something to think about. Well, all right then.” He tipped his hat and got back into his cruiser.

As Landis watched him pull past, he wondered what Bernice was doing right now.
I’m lucky
, he’d told her more than once, and this was possibly true, if mostly in a bullet-dodging sense.

When he’d moved in with Pam, it had been a halfhearted decision, entered into under the influence of the better part of a bottle of Southern Comfort and the surprising news—whispered to him as he buried his face in a pillow to go to sleep—that she was pregnant. A lie, almost certainly, he now understood. He’d heard a few years ago
that she was married, and he hoped it wasn’t just the settlement from the accident that had made her attractive to someone. He hoped it was real love she’d found. They’d both been young then, just twenty-two and twenty-three. He could still see her face, the cross-stitching on it like train tracks, could still hear her slurred voice as she struggled, even weeks after waking from her three-week sleep, to wrap her tongue around the simplest, most familiar sounds. “Landish,” she’d say, her grin now lopsided. “Landish, let’s party.” And he’d done that, watching her shaky hands roll huge, unwieldy joints that rained embers onto the cluttered coffee table in her apartment over a corner grocery in Trenton,
Born to Run
turned up so loud the dishes rattled in the kitchen sink. He did it for nearly a month—as well as the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning. He found her the lawyer, and dealt with her parents, who clearly suspected his motives, thought he was hanging around waiting for an insurance payday. He drove her to physical therapy, speech therapy.

He’d driven her down to see the car, which was at a wrecking yard near Toms River, a few miles from the spot on the parkway where she’d been hit by a stock trader who’d had three martinis and was heading back to his beach house.

“I don’t remember it at all,” she’d said.

“The accident?”

She shook her head, closed her eyes with concentration the way she did now when she was having trouble getting out a word or phrase, then brightened as it moved to her lips. “The car.”

It was a Honda Accord, but it didn’t look much like anything anymore. There was still a pair of plastic sunglasses tucked under what remained of the windshield. He took a photo for her.

That weekend while she was visiting her parents—he’d claimed a bad stomach—he packed his things. He had a distant cousin in
Denver who owned some commercial properties and had offered him work. In the note he left, he’d tried to make it sound like a sacrifice on his part, not simple abandonment—he was encouraging her to party, and it was messing up her recovery. Giving her space was the best thing he could do for her. He was even leaving her his stereo system.

Born to run.

The job in Denver hadn’t panned out, but Landis had found other gigs—construction, handyman work, whatever people were willing to pay him for—and had eventually moved down to the Springs because he felt it was time for a change, and because it was closer to actual mountains.

From the strange-looking church, he heard the sound of someone practicing the organ, although he couldn’t tell what the song was.

No one had ever said a word to him about a baby, not Pam’s parents, who looked at him with obvious distaste when he’d shuffled into her hospital room to stare at her, not any of the various doctors he’d gotten to stop for a moment to talk, even though he had no family status. He wondered what she’d have done, eventually, had things gone differently. Invented a miscarriage, too? Contrived to actually get pregnant and hope he couldn’t count up the months correctly? But that hadn’t ended up mattering, because in the end there was nothing, not even the lie itself—her mind was wiped clean of it, too.

S
he was supposed to fill out a bunch of forms. Emily lay on the floor playing with Legos, and a dog-faced woman with a little boy on her lap sat across from them, staring right at her. The boy’s nose ran freely. Bernice thought of all the germs that must be floating around the room and shuddered.
What is the main reason for your visit today?
Carefully, she inked in the word “Fever.” She read each of the following questions carefully before ticking off the “No” box, the accumulating weight of what she did not know about her own daughter growing like a tumor in her head. AIDS, no. German measles, no. Hepatitis, no. Allergies to medications, no. Major surgeries, no. The child was five—how much could have happened to her so far? Lots, of course. Lots.

Finally, when she felt she’d done her best, she turned in the clipboard. After another ten minutes or so, they were descended upon by
an acned nurse in Minnie Mouse scrubs who singsonged “What a lovely little girly!” and led them to a room where she weighed Emily and took her
temperwemperture
. The child was not amused by the baby talk, and Bernice loved her for that. They looked at each other and shared something. The world is full of these people, she tried to say with her eyes. But not everyone. You have to remain hopeful. Then they were back out in the waiting area, with its vague scent of rubbing alcohol and throw-up, and flowery wallpapered walls. FastCare, the sign outside read—some corporate approach to medicine. Bernice hadn’t been for a checkup herself since she was pregnant. She’d hated that doctor, Peregrine Stine, whom she’d suspected of being another born-again creep. She couldn’t get over the idea that she’d accidentally walked into her own version of
Rosemary’s Baby
. Emily went back to the Legos, and Bernice picked up an old copy of
Time
and looked at the ads.