Red Light Run Read online

  Glennis felt a big shameless smile open across her face. She gazed past the woman, at Rick, and she could already hear herself recounting this crazed statement to him in the morning. She wondered whether they’d get the hotel room before or after breakfast, eventually deciding that Rick was the type of person who’d want to eat first. And what kind of room? A suite probably, with mirrors on the ceiling and a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, a bed that shakes.

  One of the suits began to describe a timetable for removing the destroyed trailers and installing new ones as each family made a down payment, but the crowd wasn’t hearing it. Order eroded. Rick wandered to the back of the makeshift stage and put his cell phone to his ear. Even from that distance, in the fading light, Glennis could see his new teeth as he talked, as he smiled. Who was he talking to? Another lawyer perhaps? The fire marshal? But then he smiled again, in just such a way. A girlfriend? A fiancée? No. Just a friend, she assured herself. A guy. An old pal. And then it struck her: Rick was talking to her father.

  //

  She hurried out through the parking lot, across the street, into the bar. People she recognized from the courtyard had begun filling up the tables. When Glennis tried to order a gin and tonic the bartender offered her a weary smile.

  “You don’t understand,” Glennis explained. “I actually need this drink.”

  The bartender’s face softened. He said, “And I suppose your ID burned up in your trailer?”

  She downed the cocktail and followed it with another, then another. She made small talk with a man who’d been in the Coast Guard, which was interesting if not at all the same as the Navy. “I want to see all seven seas,” she explained, but when she looked up, the man had gone to the bathroom, or perhaps he’d gone home, which, she now remembered, was something he’d been trying to do for a while. The hour became dubious, the clock unreadable. Glennis turned to the bartender and explained that she was only drinking so much because she was thinking of leaving her boyfriend because he looked down on people who lived in trailers. She swore casually and complained about the weather, described what it was like to be pregnant by an all-state linebacker, how it felt to be defined by a serial killer.

  The bartender looked at her fearfully.

  “Yes,” she assured him, “I’m afraid too.”

  “What is it you’re afraid of?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid my dog’s never coming back.” Glennis slumped against the bar, letting the room take a spin around her. The outside world had probably already destroyed Kidnap and left him to rot in some lonely roadside field. “But really,” she said, “I’m afraid my Navy dreams aren’t enough.” These words—hearing herself say them out loud, not in the privileged confines of a doctor’s office, but in that busy public space—felt nearly treasonous.

  Glennis slid off her stool and tried to walk. She stumbled, caught herself on the pinball machine, then vomited on the glass. She assured the two men who picked her up off the floor that it was only morning sickness. But as they carried her across the street, she explained that she hadn’t kept the baby after all. Her father couldn’t know, she begged, and the Navy wouldn’t understand. The two men dumped out her purse on the doormat, a mess of coins and condoms, a crumpled lost-dog flyer. The men keyed into her room and laid her on the bed. They pulled her shoes off and peeled her soaked shirt up over her head and took off her belt, and then they stood in the doorway discussing the possibility of terrible things happening to a girl they knew, until finally they pulled the door shut and their boots scraped away.

  //

  The sun rose in the cracked window, and Glennis woke into the nauseous despair that’d been bullying her sleep all night. Distilled junipers making a vile soup of her stomach. A brittle husk drawn over the brain. Cartoons shrieked from other rooms. Somewhere, a truck beeped in endless reverse. She showered and put on the dress she’d brought.

  Outside, the tall woman sat on the Lumina’s bumper smoking a cigarette. “Last night you looked more familiar.” She surveyed Glennis carefully. “Which trailer was yours?”

  Glennis moved past her. “I’m late for breakfast.”

  “Well,” the woman said, “enjoy your pancakes.”

  Glennis looked back across the roof of her car. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Enjoy the pancakes,” the woman repeated. “You’re going to breakfast, right?”

  “How do you know where I’m going?”

  The woman ditched her cigarette on the pavement. “I didn’t mean anything by it, hon. Just enjoy the pancakes. That’s a pretty dress.”

  Glennis took a breath. She’d brushed three times, but a dry scum still lined her mouth. “I’m sorry for snapping at you,” she said. “I’m just sick of this place.”

  The woman looked up at the big faded Motel Wicklow sign. “We all are, hon.”

  Glennis let the car’s door and roof become crutches under her arms. “Which trailer was yours?”

  “Mine had all the wind chimes.” The woman tried to smile, but her jaw clenched and a frown ran in. “The one,” she said, scrambling for another cigarette, “with the little black dog always chained up in the front yard.” She finally found a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled. “I don’t think he made it.”

  Glennis looked up at the curtain of ash still marring the sky. “I lost my dog too.”

  //

  Glennis pulled back through town onto the highway, where she hung in the right lane, keeping her speed down, looking for the hotel. Eventually a salmon-colored building drew near. The parking lot looked wrong, but the big casino ship lay behind it on the river, and past the check-in desk it funneled into the same lounge from her memory. The bartender had a different face, but everything else—the woodwork and beveled mirrors—felt about right.

  The bartender approached.

  “Gin,” said Glennis. “Just gin. In a glass.”

  She put money on the bar and lifted the drink to her face. The smell promised to trim the rug off her tongue, to make the trip home a little more fluid.

  “If a man shows up,” she told the bartender, “don’t tell him I was ever here. Or, actually, tell him I joined the Navy.” As she put the glass down, a shadow fell over her arm and she turned to find Rick, freshly showered, his hair still showing the comb work.

  “Who’s joining the Navy?” he asked in a conspicuous voice, his eyes worrying over the bartender.

  She pivoted backward, into him, rising onto her toes to try to kiss him. He didn’t move his head down toward her, or perhaps he’d moved slightly away, and her lips landed on the bony underside of his jaw.

  “I am,” Glennis said. “I’m joining soon, Richard. So this is your only chance.”

  He patted her shoulder, urging her off the stool.

  “They have rooms available,” Glennis said.

  Rick carried her drink to a booth, not the booth, she noticed, but one along the same wall as before. “Glen, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  The condom wrappings came to Glennis’s mind, a sharp anxiety about the language of sex cutting through the duller, broader grief of her hangover.

  Rick urged her into one side of the booth, then put himself on the opposite seat. “You know, I was in the Navy. Petty officer first class.” He made a salute, then sipped a tiny amount of her gin. “You’re serious about this?”

  “Very serious,” she said. “Though I didn’t actually ask if they had any rooms, but the sign out front said ‘vacancy’—”

  “About the Navy, Glen.” He took a breath, a big windy sound that old people made when their patience was thinning. “The Navy. Let’s talk about the Navy.”

  “Richard . . .” she said, reaching for him.

  He pulled his hands back, hid them under the table. “Look, Glennis, about last fall . . .” His head tipped forward and he looked up through his eyebrows. “I’d had a lot to drink that day. A lot.”

  Glennis eyed her tumbler. Why hadn’t he gotten his own? And the music wasn’t right a
t all. And where were the big glass ashtrays? And Rick’s teeth, there they were again.

  “Look, Glen, what I mean is I’d love to, well, you know, with you, but it comes down to the fact that I can’t pound another sailor. I just can’t do it. It isn’t right.”

  “I’m a woman,” she said. “They do let us in the Navy now.”

  He brought his hands back onto the table and clasped them together. “I know that’s how it might be these days, but it wasn’t my experience. Call it retroactive Naval Code, but it shouldn’t be yours either. Sailors don’t plow sailors. It’s the Navy, Glen, not some Army Reserve weekend warrior bullshit. You don’t just try it out for kicks. You sign your name on the line and then they drop you into a trench for six months in a nuke sub and make you shine wrinkles off the cruise missiles all day and night. It’s hard boring work, Glen, but it’s damned worth it when you hear the deck guns laying waste to some godless port town. It’s fucking glorious is what it is.”

  “Are we talking about subs or battleships?”

  Rick unclasped his hands, seized her glass, and tipped the whole thing into his mouth. “We’re talking,” he said, alcohol flushing his face, “about the goddamn Navy.”

  The Navy. The Naval Code. Nuke subs. The goddamn Navy. These words he was saying were hers now—more hers than his even—and they meant something. They described who she was and would soon be. Codes and cruise missiles, sailors and submarines. These were the details of a life still waiting for her, a future coursing through her as she followed Rick out of the bar and across the lobby.

  She felt suddenly lighter, as if afloat on her shoe soles, then floating literally, up three floors in the elevator, the buttons lighting up under Rick’s touch, then his hand turning the knob on room 402, then his fingers prying up her bra. She lay back into the sheets, staring at the initials carved into his biceps, silently thinking Navy thoughts, letting him figure it out for her, the force and rhythm of the task. Letting him pull and push and grapple through this exercise, like a man trying to rock a vehicle out of the mud. Forward, then backward, then forward again, until all the false starts of her life so far seemed as impermanent as that hotel room, her life up to and including that sweaty grunting moment a thing she could now leave behind.

  When Rick finished, she slipped out from under, letting him fall forward, face into hands. She went to the window and looked out over the river, to where the far bank eventually gave way to an ocean of soy. On the horizon, ash still rose from Wicklow, like an enemy port smoldering in her wake.

  //

  The Lumina lifted out of the parking lot and onto the highway. The gathering gin high merged with her hangover into a single, all-encompassing impediment elbowing out all thought, leaving Glennis with nothing but the wheel and the wind. And later, home again, as she lay on the couch watching the sun bloody the trees, a memory returned, a memory of returning, of her mother walking into that diner and sitting down beside her in the corner booth. A faint but true recollection, like a whisper on the ear. Like a scratch at the sliding glass door. Kidnap.

  IN STORAGE

  Hartley Nolan could see the future. He could see the coming ebbs and the coming flows of commodities markets. Somewhere it was snowing just the right amount, and the corn, not yet planted in the frozen ground, would have a good, damp spring as a result. A bumper crop was coming, an excess in supply. Somewhere else, a farmer’s hogs were getting sick, a swine flu on the wind. The price of pork bellies would rise.

  But this particular feeling, as he sat in his office in downtown Chicago, was different. This wasn’t some hunch about wheat futures, but a more personal reckoning. An unshakable sense that his life was about to change.

  “Dude, are you buying this or not?”

  Hartley looked up from the empty space into which he’d been staring. Minutes had been lost to this intuition. Had he been asleep just now? Merely dreaming? He was awake now, surely, in his office at work, a manila file marked CORN 1ST QTR on his lap.

  “I’m fucking buying it, dude. I’m thinking of buying it. I’m thinking of clicking the mouse. What do you think?”

  Hartley’s eyes focused on the man leaning into his office. A sweaty, red-faced person named Ken Locke, the very picture of where health can go during middle age. When Ken wasn’t around, the other traders made fun of him by crouching into the pose of a wrestler and growling the man’s self-appointed catchphrase, “Locke, stock, and buy low!”

  “Nolan,” Ken barked, snapping his fingers. “Earth to Wonder Boy. Where the fuck are you right now?”

  Hartley blinked, scanning the red and green numbers on his computer screen. “Sure. Yeah. It’s a buy. I think.”

  “So you’re buying too?” Ken asked.

  “Yeah. Or, I don’t know yet.”

  “You just said it’s a buy.”

  Hartley looked around for his coffee. Where had he put it? Then he couldn’t recall if he’d even bought coffee that morning.

  “Dude, seriously,” Ken pleaded. “I’m sitting here waiting for you to stroke your crystal balls and give me a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.”

  Hartley glanced at the shelf above his desk, at the two Magic 8 Balls his old boss had given him. Around the office, Hartley had gained a reputation for hunches that paid off. A kind of corporate magic that no one actually believed in, but which everyone was afraid not to indulge.

  “To tell you the truth,” said Hartley, “I just don’t have the intel on this one yet. I haven’t had the time to research it.”

  Ken grappled his chin. “Fuck the intel, Nolan. I’ve got intel up to my ass. All week my intel’s been getting me fucked. I’m riding instinct this time. Your instinct.”

  Hartley studied the man’s reddening face. This was how it went for people in his business. Someone like Ken Locke came into your office one morning looking a little more unhealthy than usual, a little more stressed, a line of sweat on the upper lip, an itch in the left shoulder. Then you’d take a sip of coffee and suddenly the guy would be on the floor clutching his heart. Dead before the paramedics could arrive. Either that or your boss threw himself in front of a commuter train. That happened too. And in the wake of such events, others would see the light and say, That’s enough, quit. A wake-up call. Life is precious. Stop tormenting yourself fourteen hours a day over the price of soybeans.

  “Nooo-laaan . . .”

  “Did Miguel go out for coffee yet?” Hartley asked.

  “Who?”

  “The intern.”

  Ken Locke’s hands balled into fists. “Dude, what the f—”

  “Ken, I really don’t know what to tell you. My hunch is that I haven’t done the research on this one. So I guess it’s not a buy.”

  Ken Locke’s face took a darker shade, then smoothed and lightened. His fists slowly unfurled. “Now I read you, Wonder Boy,” he said, nodding slyly. “I’m hearing ‘sell’ loud and clear now. Your crystal balls have spoken, young buck.” The man backed slowly out of Hartley’s office, humping the air as he went.

  Hartley looked down at the floor, at the space onto which he’d been sure Ken Locke was going to collapse. He looked around for his coffee. The feeling returned. He couldn’t explain it.

  “I don’t understand,” said Glennis. “Are you saying you want to quit?” It was midday now. He’d found his coffee around the corner, in a Dunkin’ Donuts. But then he’d kept walking to the train station, then home to Tower Hill, where he found his wife sitting in the breakfast nook reading a novel with a glass of white wine. “I thought you loved your job.”

  “I’m just saying I had this really weird feeling,” he told her. “I don’t know what to call it. It was subtle, but huge. Like a—”

  “A hunch?”

  “It wasn’t about work stuff. It was about me. Like a doomed feeling.”

  Glennis put her novel down. The cover had a collage of images—a submarine, a sleeping baby, a row of green digital numbers frozen at 00:01. Her eyes watched him over the rim of her glass as she
sipped. “A doomed feeling, huh.”

  “Do you always have wine with lunch?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had lunch yet,” she said, getting up. “Do you want a sandwich?” She got a second glass out of the cupboard and returned to the breakfast nook.

  “Ken came into my office and I swear his heart was going to explode, right there in front of me. I thought I was witnessing his final moments.”

  “Doesn’t sound all that subtle if Ken Locke was involved.” She poured more wine into her glass, then began to pour into his, but he waved her off.

  “It sounds like you could use a drink,” she said.

  “White wine makes me foggy.”

  “Everything makes you foggy, Hartley. That’s the point.”

  “But really,” he continued, “this was happening before Ken even came in.”

  Glennis tipped his splash of wine into her own glass. “Remember that dream you had about your dad living in a storage container? And the very next day that postcard from him came in the mail?”

  “That was real,” said Hartley. “He actually lived in one of those things for a time when I was a kid.”

  “I know,” she said. “But a few years ago you dreamed about him, and then the postcard arrived the very next day. It was weird.”

  Hartley pinched his nose. “This morning’s thing was heavier than that.”

  “I’ll call your mom,” said Glennis. “Make sure everyone’s all right.”

  “You’ll call my mom?”

  “What? Why’d you say it that way?”

  “When have you ever called my mom?”

  “You’re using the word doom, Hartley. I’m trying to take you seriously.” Glennis had always believed in his ability to see the future. When they’d first met as nineteen-year-olds on spring break, he’d told her how it would go between them, how they were meant to be. After just a night and a day together, he’d laid it out for her in a diner two hours before his flight back to Chicago—time apart to let the heart grow even fonder, the drives he’d make to see her down in Champaign on weekends, the engagement after college, the marriage. At the time, she’d seemed to think he was being superlative, just a boy in lust. But over the years she’d come to believe in his foresight so sincerely that she’d stopped asking him the big questions about their own prospects. She was content with him applying it for the sake of making a little money, but he had the sense that, if times grew desperate enough and if a question were truly worthy, she might eventually call on him for one crucial prediction.