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I noticed him the minute he came out the door at Dillard's. Wearing jeans and a square-billed red cap, a sweatshirt with a torn neck over a high-necked T-shirt: there was that look about him. He paced unhurriedly down one of the broad alleys between cars, puffing into his hands to warm them. I looked a few yards ahead to the well-dressed woman walking briskly to her car, wind whipping at the tails of her long coat. I turned and looked down the parking lot and there it was, maybe twenty yards off: a dusty brown truck, Toyota or Honda, white smoke pluming from its exhaust.
I snapped the lid back on the coffee I was drinking to stay warm and started my own engine. The radio came on to a news update. I turned it off.
It was midafternoon and the mall, this end of it anyway, away from the video games and food stalls, wasn't busy. Cars, trucks and vans, the occasional walker, straggled in and out. One elderly man with thick glasses sat in his ten-year-old Lincoln reading a paper. In the lane behind me a mother who didn't look much over fourteen herself bent over in pink stretch pants to haul out of the trunk a baby carriage that unfolded and unfolded again till it was almost as large as the car it came out of. Next they'll be putting TVs on the things. Halogen lamps, sound systems, a tiny jacuzzi.
He kept blowing into his hands, pacing closer as she turned into the lane of cars and pulled out keys. He never looked up or around; his concentration was perfectly on her.
A silver Volvo.
She leaned in slightly to unlock it -- and he was suddenly there.
I heard a crash as he struck the side of the car to draw her attention away, heard her scream "You son of a bitch, I saw you you son of a bitch," and watched the two of them break like rabbits, he falling back into the long, continuous curve that had borne him close and now swept him away, she taking out in pursuit on low heels, holding her own at first (driven by adrenalin and rage), then losing ground.
"You son of a bitch," she said again, stopping.
Down the way, the dusty brown Toyota or Honda peeled out of its place.
And he ran.
He almost made it, too. He was a good runner. But he ran into something.
That was me.
His face flattened against the windshield by me, then slid down it. There was quite a bit of blood where his nose had been. I thought of those stuffed cats everyone used to have in his car, hanging on for dear life to the inside of all those windshields. His red cap blew out across the lot.
The Toyota (I could tell that now), which had begun braking for the pickup, thought better of it and, with only the briefest of pauses, the instant it took a foot to swivel from brake to accelerator, heaved itself out of the parking area towards the perimeter road, gathering speed all the while, tailpipe bucking with the effort.
I let the binoculars fall back around my neck and scribbled the license number on a pad taped to the dash. I'd see the intended victim got it. The cops would be dropping by to chat with that driver. There wasn't much they could do, really, but it would give him something to think about. You never know what effect your actions might have, even the smallest ones.
I opened my door out over his legs, picked up the purse and handed it to her along with the license number. She took both but stood looking down at him there at our feet without saying anything. Whenever he breathed, there was a dull, far-off gurgling sound, and little gobbets of blood would belly up over the rim of his nostril.
By ones and twos a crowd was beginning to gather. Security would be along soon; someone would have gone in to get them.
The woman looked at me.
"I'm okay," she said.
I nodded.
In the rearview mirror I saw her take a sketchy half-step towards me until her foot hit his leg and stopped there. Others briefly watched me pull away and looked back to her, talking among themselves, couples mostly. Wind picked at their scarves, skirts and coattails.
I drove around to the other side of the mall, parked and went in for more coffee: mine was cold. The food court was packed with young people in outlandish leisure clothes and mall workers on dinner break in various interpretations of business dress. A few families sat in the center, near the escalators and fountain, several couples farther out in the overgrowth of chairs and tables. Sometimes I can almost remember what that was like, having someone there beside you, thinking it would be like that, could be like that, forever.
The elderly man had moved in from his car. A gray cardboard tray of tacos, each diapered in paper translucent with grease, and a waxed cup the size of a child's hat sat before him on a buttonlike table lost somewhere between yellow and tan. He had his paper folded in quarters the way city people on buses do, and I could make out partial headlines over the tops of irregular blocks of print.
MAN KILLS FOUR
MILITARY ACTION INCREASES IN HOMELESS MULTIPLY
I looked away.
Then my coffee came and I went back out and sat in the car, holding the cup with both hands, breathing in that rich, earthy steam as it fogged up my glasses in a breath, a sudden tide, from the bottom up. All breath's like that, sudden and warm and alive -- then just as suddenly gone.
The sun fell into a narrow pass between clouds and horizon and bathed everything in cold light.
I sat there thinking for a moment about Karyn, all the things I'd wanted to tell her, how I had never imagined there might not be time for them all. Our daughter would have been almost five now.
Traffic around the mall was beginning to pick up. Two police cars swung in off the interstate and headed towards the other side, by Dillard's.
Back when I was getting started in the business, I did layout for our Dillard’s account. Then when we found I had a knack for it, I shifted over to writing copy. I’ll grant you there have been some problems in recent years, especially after Karyn. But you ask anyone in the business and he’ll tell you: Charlie’s a pro, he’s good. I still remember how it was when I first realized I could take all these bits and pieces of things and move them around, take a word here, open space there, and suddenly it turned into something, it started to make sense.
I guess that’s what I’m still doing.
NMM
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