Cruisers

RUSSELL BOYD THE CRUISER MOVED FROM THE DARK ONTO THE highway in a fluid rush, but inside, Russell Boyd felt the acceleration as a hard and yet pleasurable bump. The engine whined as he went through the gears, and at a hundred and ten miles an hour the lines on the road began to blur. In the turns, Boyd accelerated, and this pushed the rear end of the cruiser down so that it hugged the highway. In the certainty of speed, which was at once reassuring and still exciting, he had a thrill that was like seeing the purple approach of a storm. And where pursuit was concerned, Russell liked the flowing attraction toward those lights up ahead, just as he was aware, in the moment, of how he and the driver of the other car were bound together by speed. It pulled them together with a constant attraction, like gravity. And as the speedometer swept upward, Russell tried to relax, to take it easy, and to make sure he didn't miss much. He went after was Audi with just two seats, and when he came up behind it, he keyed the mike and asked the dispatcher for a check of the license plate. Who owned the car, priors, outstanding warrants, unpaid fines. The dispatcher couldn't say who was in the car. Boyd turned on the blue lights, and the Audi pulled over, the driver making a signal when he did so. Boyd angled the cruiser's nose turned toward the passing traffic, and he turned the wheels, too, so that if the cruiser got rear-ended, it wouldn't hit him as he stood next to the Audi. Then he opened the door and swung into the shudder of air that was left by a passing car. The anxious trembling of wind was enhanced by the throbbing of blue light, and Boyd hesitated, taking a moment to look around. Some nights when it was cold he saw the indifferent stars, which were the color of the blue haze beneath the lights from a Sunoco gas station. When he was scared, which was the next step up from being alert, the haze appeared to him like ground mist spilling into an open grave. This didn't last long, and he was glad when dread receded into the part of the mind where shadows blended with only half-formed apprehensions. There were other times, though, when everything was going as it should, when the speed had its effect on him, like music, and then the haze beneath the lights of a gas station appeared to him like the steam when Zofia was in the shower and the liquid sheen of water ran down her hips and legs. Boyd couldn't quite recall her as well as he wanted, not photographically, but he was reassured by something else, which was the seep and itch of desire. But even so, he still wanted to be precise about what happened the instant she came into a room in the evening when he had been waiting for her. It was as though the room was suddenly filled with . . . he wasn't sure what to call it. He knew she changed the room, but he couldn't say more than that. And even though he wasn't sure what the precise word was, he knew that when Zofia came into the room, her hair moving into the light of a lamp, he instantly existed in a state of pleasurable alertness. Then she'd drop her papers, her teacher's roll book, kick off her shoes, drop her skirt, and stand there looking at him. "I'm going to take a shower," she would say. "Want to come with me?" Now he looked for a detail about the Audi that would tell him something, a smell, a broken light, the way the car sat on its springs. Was it carrying something heavy? Was the license plate clean while the rest of the car was dirty? Were the people in the car passing anything between them? Were they red-eyed and slurring on alcohol or something else? Were their pupils like pinholes? He stood there in the blue light and put his hand on his pistol, which was made out of stainless steel to protect it from the corrosiveness of road salt. Then he took his hand away, not wanting the cheap reassurance of the thing. Reassurance cNova, Craig is the author of 'Cruisers', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400045365 and ISBN 1400045363.