The Mirror Thief(185)
He folds over the hood and slides. Everything is silent. His arms and legs are heavy, stretching in opposite directions, wringing him in the middle like a wet towel. Albedo is still shooting; the air contracts as each bullet passes. The pickup’s windshield spiderwebs under Curtis and he’s in the air again, wobbling like a poorly tossed football. Three shots. Four. Curtis’s left hand closes on something hard and smooth. He comes down in the truck’s bed, slamming into the gate. He caught the last bullet. Everything spins, then settles. Curtis sprawls splaylegged on the polyurethane bedliner, looking at the road. Broken again. Still alive. The blob of lead cooling in his palm.
The screech of metal tearing metal wounds Curtis’s ears, and for an instant the cement truck eclipses his sight. Once it’s passed, the Mercury appears before him, spinning like a dreidel on its front bumper, its tail end bent where the mixer hit it: a dancing questionmark. It rotates slowly, drifting toward the edge of the road; then its deformed trunk falls open and Argos emerges, dead, his bloody plastic shroud unfurling like a scroll as he drops to the pavement. The Merc brushes the guardrail, tips, and now here comes Albedo, sliding turdlike through the shattered windshield, a befuddled expression on his pale torn-up face. The Merc is falling, he’s rolling down the hood like a gymnastic toddler, and as the car vanishes into the wash he slides over the silver V of the hood-ornament and plops onto the blacktop, slumped against the damaged barrier, his legs crossed almost casually atop the roadstripe. His right hand still curls around Curtis’s empty revolver; he’s breathing, but a lot of fluid issues from his ears and nose, and Curtis can tell he’s done.
Curtis doesn’t hear the crash when the car hits the ground, but after a minute black smoke rises from the wash, blotting out the valley, and it’s followed by a few tongues of flame. Curtis tries to shift his weight but can’t move; now he knows that he’s hurt badly, which is fine. He’s on home turf now, for the first time in years. Bones broken. Spine probably okay: he can feel pain coming in a hurry, getting decoded by his brain. It’s going to be bad, but he thinks he can pass out soon. Unconsciousness is teasing him; he tries to remember it like an old phone number.
He caught the last bullet: the one that would’ve been Stanley’s. This is what he wanted. It’s big and glassy in his hand, and he uncurls his fingers to look at it. It hurts to move them, but he does it, slowly, and then he smiles. His own unblinking gray eye stares from the bowl of his palm.
By the time the flames find the Merc’s tank and the orange rose blooms over the desert Curtis isn’t seeing anything anymore, but he feels the heat on his closed eyelids, and he imagines the flower rising, going black. The warmth is a comfort to him. He follows it into sleep.
58
Stanley would like to go back to the boardwalk, to see it one last time before he splits, but he thinks better of it. Cops will still be out in force—hunting for him, cleaning up the mess he made—and he has no special desire to shoot a cop tonight. Besides, in some ways he feels like he’ll know the waterfront better once it’s out of sight for good, once his memory has begun to take it apart.
He heads through the neighborhood, paralleling the shoreline, through the traffic circle and into the streets that he and Welles walked through. Almost no one is afoot, which makes Stanley look suspicious; he zigzags a lot, doubles back often. Somewhere in the city Welles and his wife are seated in a waiting room while some doctor patches Claudio up—or else they’re on their way home by now, headed back to rescue the girl. Stanley has no picture of it; can’t get himself to care. The thought of them won’t stay in his head: it’s shoved out, as if by the wrong pole of a magnet.
Cop cruisers sweep the streets, but plenty of other cars are out too: the traffic on the main thoroughfares and the pattern of one-way streets makes it tough for them to follow a pedestrian. Sometimes squads pass him and U-turn suddenly, or speed up to make a block, but Stanley’s always able to cut across a yard and disappear, or to lie low in a flowerbed while they circle. The bright rows their headlights carve across the wet pavement remind Stanley of the twin furrows of Sonja Heine’s skates in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese.
By the time he’s reached the oilfield and the first of the old canals, his duck-and-cover routine has grown tiresome: he’s feverish again, wracked by chills, ready to get off the street. He crosses his arms, hugs himself, lowers his head and quickens his step, muttering curses through chattering teeth. Cursing himself and the world. Cursing Welles most of all. Maybe you conjured me, Stanley seethes. You ever think of that, you fat son of a bitch? Maybe it was me all along you conjured. Maybe you conjured me.
For a long time he walks without being aware of walking. His mind is elsewhere, or nowhere; his feet advance mechanically, of their own accord. When he snaps back to attention with the sensation of waking up, he’s surprised to find himself still in motion, and uncertain of where he is. He stops by a parked car, puts down his pack, unsheaths the canteen and drinks. The taste of the water is sharp on his tongue, flavored by the old tin; he thinks of his father in Leyte and Okinawa, deadened and enlivened by hours of fighting, tasting the same tinny water. He remembers struggling to lift the fieldpack the day his father gave it to him: it was bigger than he was then. If I don’t get into this war, I’ll go nuts. I don’t understand nothing about peace. That may be f*cked up, but it’s true. People don’t want me around, and I don’t want to be around. In peace I’m nobody. I don’t even recognize myself.