“Tell you what,” Ray said. “We’ll fix it for you.” He looked around. “Won’t we, guys?”
“Ya, sure,” one said.
“To show you we’re okay, we’ll fix it for you, you won’t have to do a thing. Then we can go to the cops together, you and me, report our accident.”
In a low voice Helen said, “Don’t believe them.”
“You got tire tools, mister?” the man with the beard said.
“Don’t get out of the car,” Laura said.
“No need,” Ray said. “Use ours. Come on, let’s get moving.”
The three men went to the trunk of their car while Tony and his wife and daughter watched with their doors locked, watched while the men brought out their tools, the jack, the tire iron.
“You got a spare tire?” the man with the glasses said. The men started to laugh, except Ray. “You can’t change a tire without a spare.” Ray was not laughing. He was not grinning. He looked in the window and didn’t say anything. Then he said, “You wanna give me the keys to the trunk?”
“Don’t do it!” Helen said.
The man looked at her a long time, staring.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” he said.
Tony Hastings sighed and opened the door. “I’ll open it for you,” he said. He heard Helen moan in the back, “Daddy.”
And Laura saying softly, “It’s all right, just be calm.”
He got out and opened the trunk and lifted out the suitcases and boxes in the light of the flashlight held by the man with the beard, until they could get at the spare tire. He watched the two men get it out while Ray stood by. They put the jack under the front wheel, and the man with the beard said, “Get them women outa the car.”
“Come on,” Ray said. “Get them out.”
“It isn’t necessary, is it?” Tony Hastings said.
“Get em out. We’re fixin your tire so get em out.”
Tony looked in at his wife and daughter. “It’s all right,” he said. “They just want you out while they fix the tire.” So they got out and stood close to Tony near the door of the car. He thought if these men were dangerous it would be safer to stay near the car. The men went to work raising the car on the jack and loosening the flattened tire.
“Hey you,” Ray said. “Come over here.” When Tony didn’t move, he came over. He said, “You think you’re fuckin hot stuff, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“ ‘What are you talking about?’ They think they’re fuckin hot stuff, don’t they?”
“Who?”
“Them, your women, your bitches. You too. You think you’re something special, you can bump a guy’s car and run off to the cops in violation of the law.”
“Listen, you were playing some crazy games out there.”
“Yeah.”
Every so often while they worked a car or a truck went by, full speed. Tony Hastings wished one would stop, he wanted someone civilized between him and these wild men he didn’t know what they might do. Once a car slowed down, he thought it was going to stop, he stepped forward, but something grabbed him by the arm, drew him back. Ray was in front of him, blocking the view, and the car drove on. A little later, he saw the flashing blue lights of a police car approaching. They’re coming to rescue us, he thought, and he ran out toward it as it neared, coming fast. It did not slow down and he suddenly realized it wasn’t going to stop. He waved anyway and tried to shout as it zipped by. He heard women’s family voices shouting too, but the car was already sparkling down the road at a hundred miles an hour out of sight.
“There goes your cops,” Ray said. “You should have stopped them.”
“I tried to,” Tony said. He felt defeated, wondering what other trouble had caught the attention of the police while his own remained unnoticed in the dark.
The men seemed to enjoy their work. They were laughing, and he realized one of them had worked in a garage. Only Ray was not laughing. Tony Hastings did not like the waiting expression on Ray’s pinched chinless face. The man is angry, he said to himself, while his own anger had ravelled out in the strangeness of things. He thought, they are trying to show me they are not what they seemed to be. They are trying to show me they are decent human beings after all. He hoped that was it.
THREE
Susan Morrow sets down the page. Quiet returns, here where she lives, with the sound of the refrigerator, the Monopoly-playing children murmuring and laughing in the next room. Here, in this wooded enclave of winding residential streets, all is calm, all is still. It’s safer here. She arches, stretches, this impulse to the kitchen for more coffee. Resist. Have a green wrapper mint instead, on the table under Martha’s tail.
Once she too drove all night, Susan and Arnold and the children to Cape Cod. Arnold is smarter than Tony Hastings, could he have avoided Tony’s fix? He’s a distinguished man, he could give those men bypass surgery for fixing his tires, would that protect him? He’s also a grinning boy with dusty hair who makes questionable jokes and waits for your response. Tonight Arnold is in a hotel, she almost forgot from worrying about imaginary Tony, in a tropical bamboo lounge underground in the dark, having drinks with the medical folk. Don’t watch.
Martha the cat studies her, quietly puzzled. Every night Susan sits like this, stalking the flat white page in the glare as if she saw something which Martha sees is plainly not there. Martha understands stalking, but what can she stalk in her own lap, and how can she stalk with face so relaxed? Martha stalks for hours too, with only her tail twitching, but when she stalks there’s always something, a mouse or bird or the illusion of one.
Nocturnal Animals 3
The man with the triangular face whose name was Ray, the mouth too small for his chin, the half bald head with the pompadour, stood with hands in his pockets and watched the others work. He tapped his feet on the ground like a dance. I mustn’t forget this is the man who forced me off the road, Tony Hastings said to himself, not forgetting. The man kept murmuring, “Fuck you,” like a song. Tapping his feet and murmuring “Fuck you,” looking at Tony’s wife and daughter standing by the back door of the car close together, as if saying it to them, and then at Tony, looking at Tony while he murmured it, as if to him. In a kind of tune just loud enough to be heard, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
“What are you looking at?” the man said.
“What were you trying to do, there on the road?” Tony said.
A truck was coming, it went by, loud. If the man answered Tony did not hear it. A car or truck would go by every three or four minutes, maybe more. As long as cars go by we’re safe, Tony thought, wondering what danger he was safe from.
“Hot shot,” the man said.
“What?”
“Law-abiding driver.”
“What?”
“That all you can say, ‘what’?”
“Look here—”
“I’m looking.”
He could not speak, caught, not having prepared a speech for his emotions.
“What were you trying to do, there on the road?” the man said after a while.
“We’re just trying to get where we’re going.”
“Where a you going?”
Tony held back.
“Where a you going?”
“We’re trying to get to Maine. We’re just trying to get to Maine.”
“What’s in Maine?”
Tony did not want to answer.