Something Rising (Light and Swift) (22 page)

“Everybody knows.”

“Kind of you to continue drinking with me.”

“I'm not drinking with you.”

“No?”

“That's your beer, this is mine.”

“I'm a free man or whatnot.”

“Yep.”

“Not running hither-skither in my Events.”

“Nope.”

The jukebox changed to Merle Haggard. Puck drained his beer in a matter of minutes, signaled Bud for another. He was wearing a T-shirt under a thick flannel shirt with jeans, and every few seconds he tugged at the neck of the T-shirt as if it were choking him. “Dear old Emmy,” he said, “what a full, rich life. And that charming, handsome husband! I almost wish they had their own radio show. So that we might all wake up with them in the morning and hear their conversation over coffee and the morning paper. I'm sure you know what I mean.”

Bud brought Puck's second beer, gave Cassie a look.

“Part of the joy of living here is, oh I know what you think I'm going to say, the flatness and the winters and whatnot, but beyond the obvious, the joy of living here is that we never need worry about achieving anything. Surviving the quotidian is frankly enough.” He took a long drink, tapped the bottle on the bar a few times, then turned to face Cassie. He grabbed her hands and kissed the knuckles, laughing all the while. Tears ran down his cheeks and onto Cassie's fists. “You've got to get out of here,” he said, between kisses, “I love you so much, you've got to go, Cassie, please.”

She leaned toward him, brushed his face with her fingers. She saw him climb the ladder to reach her twenty years before, that flash of pale skin. “Okay.”

“Please,” he said.

Cassie had made the grocery list; there was barely anything in the house to eat, no coffee, no soup or bread, they had one can of cat food left, and Belle had added to the list: celery, pimento cheese. The grocery store was busy, and people kept bumping into her or stopping in the middle of the aisles, and while she was shopping, she was reminding herself that Laura was dead. A stunning bit of news. The soup cans were almost too heavy to lift; taking money from her wallet and handing it to the cashier seemed unmanageable. But she managed. Cassie put the groceries in the back of her old Mazda truck and wondered if pimento cheese had a single vitamin in it, was it actually dairy, could it provide any nourishment to Belle, given that it was orange, like real food. She pulled out of the Kroger parking lot and on to Highway 12. First gear
was sluggish, certainly, but it was second gear she would vote Least Likely To Succeed.

She hovered in the turn lane a moment, waiting for an opening, then eased into the left lane, heading toward downtown Roseville. A dark green minivan was trying to pass an old Buick at exactly the same moment and ended up behind her truck. Cassie waved in her rearview mirror to apologize for her slowness; the minivan flashed its lights at her, which even in the broad sun glared in her rearview mirror. Shifting into third, Cassie could feel the truck begin to respond, and looked to see if she could move over into the right lane and allow the van to pass her. The old Buick pulled up alongside her on the right. The driver, who appeared to be in his eighties, was wearing a plaid golf cap with a ball on top and was signaling to turn left. Odds were, Cassie knew, that his signal had been on the past five hundred miles and would remain so until the man died.

The minivan sped up behind her, nearly touching her bumper. The van's windows were tinted; even lifting her sunglasses, Cassie couldn't see the driver. They came to a stoplight. Taco Bell was on their left, Arby's on their right, and beyond that McDonald's, Hardee's, Noble Roman's pizza, with a periodic gas station or dollar store. The driver of the minivan stayed in the left lane behind Cassie, who couldn't merge to the right or get out of the way. When the light turned green, Cassie accelerated as much as she dared in first, and the truck sort of puttered into the intersection before she pushed it into second; the van's lights flashed again, and the driver began to honk. Cassie looked in her rearview mirror and said aloud, “What? Are you an ambulance, what?” By now there were five or six cars behind the old Buick, and more coming.
Cassie would never be able to move over before the next light, where the drama would begin all over again.

They went through the third light with more honking and flashing, and then the road opened up for over a mile, becoming residential. As the line of traffic reached the cemetery, a gently sloping twenty-five acres that from a distance looked like thousands of women in spring hats, the minivan passed Cassie in the turn lane. The driver cut too abruptly and too close and clipped the edge of Cassie's bumper. Cassie felt the truck jerk forward and then pull to the side, and realized what had happened. The driver sped past as Cassie reached cruising speed.

For a moment she was certain she had gone blind. Everything on her periphery, the cemetery and the chain-link fence around it, the other cars turned white. Her stomach muscles clenched and relaxed, her chest began to burn, she gripped the steering wheel and gearshift so hard her knuckles lost contact with her blood supply. The van cut back in front of Cassie and slowed down to forty-five, the speed limit. Cassie reached under the driver's seat, veering in the process, and pulled out her tire iron, wishing she had brought her gun. If she had the gun, she'd simply shoot the tires out of the van that second, then wait until the driver either left the road voluntarily or crashed, at which point Cassie would pull him from the wreckage, sling him to the ground, and shoot him repeatedly.

With Cassie out of the way, the van meandered up to the next light, where the driver turned left, passing a Burger King and a Pizza Hut, then a dentist's office and the sprawling high school. Cassie stayed behind it. The van followed the curving lane around the school and turned right on to an old residential street, then
right again. The lots got larger, and the houses got uglier; this swath of land had been a farm until sometime in the mid-1980s, when it was sold in half-acre parcels. The faux Victorians under their blankets of vinyl siding, already revealing their cheap materials and shoddy construction, combined with the rows of identical yards, made Cassie even angrier. Her breathing became shallow, her palms began to sweat. She would kill the driver, then burn down the house. Cassie turned left as the driver did, on to a cul-de-sac. The van pulled into the driveway of one of the three houses on the dead end. The house was the yellow of a crayon, with black shutters; the grass was so short it looked tortured. Cassie turned off the truck and was out the door before it stopped rolling. She'd blocked the van in. Holding the curved end of the tire iron in her hand, she took a practice swing, then shattered the van's left rear taillight. It didn't take much.

“Get out of the van!” Cassie yelled, kicking the rear tire. If the driver was a man with a gun, she wanted to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. No one inside the van moved. Cassie swung the tire iron at one of the side windows, but it didn't break. Raising the iron over her head, she brought it down on the driver's mirror, which bent all the way down to the door but held on. Cassie dropped her weapon and began pummeling the driver's window with her open palms, kicking the door at the same time, shouting, “Get the fuck out! Get out here and face me!”

The driver was an overweight woman in her thirties. Her short hair was curly and had been frosted, probably at home. She wore glasses, and her skin was a strange orange color; Belle used to refer to these women, Cassie suddenly remembered, as Riders on the Pilgrim Holiness Church Bus and Tanning Bed. The woman was wearing a yellow sweatshirt emblazoned with an image of Winnie
the Pooh in the honey tree, a child's sweatshirt made enormous by a sinister consortium. That was all Cassie could see, and she absorbed it in a glance. The woman sat facing forward; she was resolute in her refusal to make eye contact with Cassie.

They had probably been at the grocery store together, if not today then on some other Wednesday. Cassie would have barely registered the woman's existence but for the waves of scorn such women often radiated at her. What did they see? Cassie wondered, facing the hostile stares of suburban women out with their children. She kicked the van's door, pounded on the window with her fists, shouted, “You were trying to fucking
kill me
because I wasn't driving fast enough for you?
Get The Fuck Out Of This Van
.” The woman wouldn't look at her, would not look at her, and just before Cassie picked up the tire iron and went to work on the windshield, she saw something in the backseat: a small pink tennis shoe, a white sock. Cassie shielded her eyes and looked in the side window. There was a car seat and a little girl, maybe two years old. Her eyes were the size of walnuts, and she was staring right back at Cassie, not crying, not moving.

Cassie took a step backward as if she'd been slapped. She pressed her fingertips against her temples and said aloud Good God. A cold breeze she hadn't noticed before snaked inside her jacket; the adrenaline that had been propelling her drained away so quickly she felt faint. She walked back up to the driver's window, tapped on the glass, but the woman still wouldn't turn her head. Perhaps she'd had some sort of stroke and was paralyzed. “Ma'am?” Cassie said. “You were driving like that with a child in your car, and this whole time I've been at you with a tire iron, you did nothing to protect her? You
suck
as a mother, your house is hideous, and you do
not
own the fucking road.”

She walked back to her truck, slung the tire iron across her front seat, slammed her door. Her head hurt and the palms of her hands stung. She backed out of the driveway and turned around in the cul-de-sac, watching the van in her rearview mirror until she got to the corner, but no one ever emerged. The house was completely still, the last Cassie saw of it.

That night, after Belle had settled down in the living room with a book, Cassie went out on the front porch with a beer. If she'd had her gun with her, she would have killed Winnie the Pooh. She could talk to Edwin, she could talk to Bud or Belle, but what could they say that she didn't already know? She thought about how often it happened that a liar was to two liars born, how tendencies fine or subtle or peculiar thread their way through the genes and out into the world. Her father had an exquisite temper: he was fast, verbally; he struck, he got over it. As a child Cassie never saw it coming, she had to train herself to stay out of the way. When he was on a losing streak, or when he was caught in his own congealing guilt, Laura called him the Mongoose. Cassie took a deep breath, closed her eyes. It had been Laura's temper that unhinged her daughters. Children are like dogs, Cassie thought, they can adjust to the periodic boot to the ribs, even if it arrives for arbitrary reasons and is followed by a pat on the head, but they don't know what to do with someone who stays blank and silent and simmering for days on end. Laura's unhappiness was her religion.

It was a freezing night. Cassie pulled her coat more closely around her, tugged her hat down over her ears. She could see her breath, but the sky was clear and the stars were hard and bright,
the beer felt good. A car turned slowly in to the driveway. The driver turned off his lights but left the engine running. “Oh, shit,” Cassie said, putting down her beer. It was a sheriff's deputy, taking his time about getting out of the car. Cassie knew most of the myriad ways cops abused the general public, and this was one of them, not getting out of the car. She didn't stand up. The cop could probably see her in the dim yellow glow of the porch light. She could wait as long as he could. When he finally stepped out of the car, Cassie saw it was only Josh Fellers. They'd gone to school together.

Josh closed the heavy car door, then squinted up at the porch. “Cass? You up there?”

“Hey, Josh.”

He walked around and opened the screen door, then sighed and settled down into the splintery rocking chair.

“Don't scoot around on that chair,” Cassie said, taking another drink of her beer.

“I won't. I remember it.”

“You want a beer?”

Josh yawned. “I'm on duty. For a few more minutes, anyway.”

“How's Tracy?”

“She's good.”

“The girls okay?”

“They're fine. Growing like weeds. Now, look here, Cassie.” Josh reached down and adjusted the volume on his radio. The dispatcher's voice, distant and free of emotion, receded. “Strange thing happened today. A woman named Nancy Cobb was driving her dark green Dodge Caravan on Highway 12 when an older Mazda truck, light blue with a camper shell on the back, began following her and followed her all the way home. Right into her
driveway. At which time the driver of the truck, a woman she placed in her mid- to late-twenties with long light brown or blond hair, did with malicious intent attack the van, destroying a rear taillight and the driver's mirror, cracking a side window, and denting the driver's door.”

“That is interesting,” Cassie said, letting her head fall first toward her left shoulder, then toward her right, popping her neck.

“The driver of the Mazda truck did all of this, and I quote, without provocation.”

“Hmmm.” Cassie shook her head, as if the ways of humanity were mysterious and perverse. “Did she get the plate number? Of the assailant's truck?”

“Nope. But she says she would sure recognize that assailant, or her truck, in a flat second.”

“So she confronted the attacker? Face-to-face?”

“Mrs. Cobb says she was so terrified that she couldn't turn her head, that she refused to look at the other woman for fear of making her more angry.”

“She said that?”

Josh nodded. “I wrote it down.”

“Doesn't sound like she's got much of a case, if you ask me.” Cassie drank the last of her beer.

“You know of many light blue Mazda trucks in this county, Cass? I ask you. My granddad sold me his old Toyota Tercel, and it got vandalized in the first week because it wasn't a Ford or a Chevy, buncha damn rednecks. I had to sell it for scrap, and it was a good car.”