Don't Make Me Stop Now (16 page)

“That new guy she sees.”

“What's his name?”

“She never said.”

“What did she say, Debbie?”

Debbie clammed up, seemed embarrassed to have said anything at all, which left Sanderson to sneak some on his own. He staked out her house after work. It wasn't hard to go unnoticed in his uncle's big pitiful Ford Fairlane. He found a spot a few houses down where he could see but not be seen, and many a night he'd spent there, drinking and listening to talk radio or a baseball game, eating from cans and bags of chips, if at all. Her lover came for the first time three days after he began his surveillance. She was with him — they both climbed out of the pickup, he even went round to open the door for her, something Sanderson had never seen the point
in himself, especially if you were driving a beat-to-shit death trap with muddy tires. They walked arm in arm to the door, kissed on the porch, lingered there underneath the light as if putting on a show for Sanderson. It was a sight, damn sure was. He could have lived another hundred years and not seen anything so grisly but he could not turn his head, no way.

So far he had merely observed. He mounted evidence, which he documented in a pocket-size spiral notebook he kept on the dashboard of the Ford along with all his other vital paperwork. When the time came for action, he would know it, and now it had come, tonight was the night. Here he was in the driveway, had the fucker blocked in.
No way out,
he wrote in his pocket spiral.

He reached beneath the seat for a fresh pint, broke the seal, and sat back in the sprung seat to sip himself up for the moment. He hadn't really planned anything to say, for he would forget it all anyway in the heat, and besides, what did it matter what he said to them? They knew why he was here, what he wanted. They probably knew that better than he did himself.

It got late and the pint got low, then empty. Sanderson cracked the seal on his backup, turned the radio on, and listened to a talk-show host berate his callers for their stupid opinions. Beside the Ford, cigarette butts heaped in a pile in
the grass. There were no other cars out, only cats slinking and screeching, and once he spotted a possum waddling around the side of the house where she kept the trash cans, and he was glad to share the night with these stealthy creatures who did their business in the dark. He spoke to them warmly, and they offered their condolences, as if they knew just from looking at the angle of his repose in the front seat of the Ford how much misery he was shouldering.

He did not mean to nap, but even when the policeman woke him with the butt end of a flashlight tapping on his window, he did not think it a terrible idea, given the weight of what lay ahead.

He cracked the window an inch. The policeman was standing in a gray, sickly light, which took Sanderson a few seconds to realize was dawn. Mist rose from the lawn. He heard a paper slap pavement down the street.

“Step out of the vehicle, please,” said the policeman.

Sanderson squinted to read the officer's name tag. His name was Britt and he was bulky and very black-skinned. He had no hair at all. Sanderson was glad he had ditched Walter, who would have had things to say about this officer Britt, none of them too respectful.

“Good morning, Officer Britt,” said Sanderson.

“I asked you to step out of the car, sir.”

Officer Britt leaned toward the crack in the window. Sanderson smelled coffee on his breath, which reminded him of his own breath, and the fact that he was quite possibly breaking more than one law this early in the morning. It didn't seem fair at all to have been waked from what was surely a dream of reconciliation into a world where you were guilty before you were even allowed to brush your teeth.

Sanderson climbed out of the car slowly. He wobbled a little and grabbed hold of the door to steady himself, and Officer Britt inquired as to how much he'd had to drink, and Sanderson said he couldn't really say, he'd just woken up, give him a minute to get his head clear.

“You got any weapons in the car?” said Officer Britt.

“Not unless you count a tent pole,” said Sanderson.

“Put your hands up on the car, spread your legs.”

Sanderson did as he was told. Officer Britt was light-fingered and even though it was crazy, Sanderson thought how good it felt to be touched by someone, even a black, a man, a cop.

“Okay,” said Officer Britt when he had frisked Sanderson up and down. He asked Sanderson his name and checked his driver's license and his registration, which was in his uncle's name, his own car, Sanderson explained rather patiently to
the officer, having been burned up in a recent fire, which claimed also his house and all his worldly possessions.

“Sorry to hear about that,” said Officer Britt.

“Oh, I set fire to it myself.”

“That won't too smart,” said Officer Britt. He was checking over the registration, and Sanderson got the feeling he did not believe much that was coming out of Sanderson's mouth. This hurt a little.

“See, she left me. I wanted her to come home.”

“Which home was it you were wanting her to come home to?”

“Say what?”

Officer Britt spoke slowly and bit his consonants, as if he thought Sanderson did not speak English.

“I asked how she's going to come home to you if you burned your durn house down?”

“I figured we could stay in a motel.”

“This the same woman whose property you're trespassing on?”

Sanderson realized for the first time that she had called the cops on him. Couldn't she have come out to shoo him away? He wanted badly to be angrier than he was. What was wrong with him this morning? He felt like lying down in the grass, going limp like a protester on television. He felt
like letting his bones dissolve into an act of aggressive nonviolence and letting Officer Britt call a backup to help lift him onto a stretcher, upon which he would be carried out into the country by four burly cops, pallbearer silent and reverent, to a place where his domed tent rested in a spot by a creek. Officer Britt appeared very serious, as if he was trying to remember something, the rights he was about to read to Sanderson perhaps. What rights would those be?

“She told you I'm trespassing?”

“That's what this is called, sir. She don't want you here, it's called trespassing. Why you want to block her in? She can't even get out her driveway.”

“Oh, I'm not blocking her in. I mean, I know she's blocked in, too, but that's only because he's parked behind her. He's the one blocking her in. I'm blocking him in.”

“I'm not going to get into any of that. What I'm going to do right now is ask you to follow me over to my vehicle. Can you walk okay?”

“Of course I can walk.”

Officer Britt took Sanderson's arm anyway. He led him over to the cruiser and delivered him into the backseat and asked for the car keys, which Sanderson said were in the ignition. He'd worn the battery down listening to an all-night talk radio show. This he had done deliberately, so he could
not move the car even if asked, but Officer Britt managed to get the car started anyway, and Sanderson felt like crying as he watched his uncle's car bounce into the street and come to a noisy rest by the curb in front of her house.

Officer Britt got out and went to the door. She answered his ring immediately, and as she asked him in he got a glimpse of her, dressed in one of his old T-shirts and a pair of pajama bottoms. He checked the windows to see if her lover was spying on him from another room but saw nothing at all but the earliest sun bouncing off the glass.

“I hate that sculpture,” said Sanderson to Officer Britt when he climbed back in the car with his clipboard. “Don't you hate that sculpture right there?”

Officer Britt had donned a pair of glasses in order to complete his paperwork. He turned to look at Sanderson slumped in the backseat, then cut his eyes toward the work of art in question.

“She declined to press charges, Mr. Sanderson. But she's going down to the station little later on to get a restraining order sworn out on you. You know what that means, Mr. Sanderson?”

“It means she loves me?”

Sanderson thought he heard Officer Britt laugh, but maybe it was himself he heard, and maybe it was the sound of some
other emotion. He went ahead and smiled anyway, as if he had said something funny and people admired him for his ability to laugh away life's unfairness.

“It means you are not to come within one hundred yards of her at any time. It means you are not to contact her, and you can't be passing out in her driveway, and you can't be acting like you acted last night.”

How else am I going to act, Sanderson wanted to ask. Just tell me this: what else am I supposed to do with this love? Where am I supposed to put it, now that she's gone and found herself another lover? Sanderson managed to stop himself from saying such a pitiful thing, for he knew that to Officer Britt, to everyone else in the world, it was not love that made him act this way. He realized that to the rest of the world he was a sore loser, if not a plain old loser, and that to them, the only thing he was in love with was a misery of his own making.

But those people would not know real love if it came for them at daybreak, tapping a flashlight against their window, ordering them out of their vehicle, reading them their rights. Like the good officer Britt, who was asking Sanderson if he had someplace to go this morning.

But Sanderson, thinking he was bound to come too close to her and get himself busted, was thinking about his rights.
Aside from the right to deny his love, which he'd already blown, it seemed he had no rights. There exists no protection for those left behind — the law sides with the leavers — and the only order he was bound by was the love he held on to even now. She might make it official that he could only love her from a distance, but so long as he did not abandon his love, there were no boundaries. What he did in its service — burn his house down, take a drink, block her lover's pickup in her drive — was sanctioned by laws simpler and larger than the ones that had landed him in the back of this cruiser.

How could they use against him anything he said in the name of his love? Sanderson was halfway out with his story before he even knew what he was going to say, and it felt right to say it even to a cop.

“The last night she spent with me, I tricked her into coming over to my house. I called her up and told her I didn't trust myself not to drink and would she come over there and sit with me for a while. She'd already mailed me my key back and I didn't ask her for my key back, I didn't want it back, I wanted her to keep it forever. Anyway, she rang the damn doorbell. I was lying in the bed, in the dark, and I hated hearing that doorbell ringing, while I was lying there in the dark, waiting for the woman I loved to come home to me, knowing I'd driven her away.”

Officer Britt put his clipboard on the dashboard of the cruiser, and Sanderson thought he heard him sigh, but it could have been the creak of his holster as he relaxed into the seat, it could have been, instead of a sigh, some sign that he wanted to hear what Sanderson had to say.

“She lay down next to me in bed and we were talking and I was telling her how I loved her and wanted her back and she was tired from work and after a while she fell asleep. I was just about as happy then, listening to her breathing in her sleep, as I'd ever been. I mean, I felt bad for how I got her to come over to the house, I wasn't really all that in danger of drinking, no more than I've been since she left me, but I also felt so right to have her there in bed beside me, even though she had on all her clothes and her car keys were lying on the edge of the bed. I got up and put a blanket over her and she was dead asleep and after a while I fell asleep myself.”

“Mr. Sanderson,” said Officer Britt. “We need to get you squared away.”

“Sometime in the night, late, I woke up and I moved close to her and took her in my arms and she let me and we slept like that for a while, and then I started kissing her and at first she just froze, but then she started to kiss me back some and all of a sudden she sat right up in the bed and said, ‘I am not
going to feel bad about this tomorrow, I'm not,' and then she took off her clothes and we went at it.”

“Mr. Sanderson, I don't care to hear the details of your love life with your former girlfriend. What I care to hear is where you want to go right now. I can't let you stay here, you know.”

“I ain't bragging, I don't have anything to gain by lying to you. I already lost everything, can't bring it back with lies. I'm telling you the truth, sir, nothing but. I did not give a damn about satisfying myself and it was the best love I'd ever made. I just concentrated on making her feel good so she'd see how capable I was after all, and it worked. You can tell, you know. It's obvious when you're satisfying the woman you love and for us men there's no better feeling in this world. You know what I'm talking about, don't you, Officer?”

“I hear you,” Officer Britt said reluctantly.

“I felt like everything was going to be fine then. She was making some serious noise, she wasn't trying to hide it, how good it felt to be with me again, and then all of a sudden her cries turned to sobbing and I was holding her face in my hands and I will tell you what, Officer, I could of lived a thousand years without figuring out that her face was wet with tears and not sweat worked up from pleasure.”

Officer Britt was silent. He stared out the window at the sculpture, and for a minute it seemed he was about to answer Sanderson's question about whether he liked it, but then Sanderson started talking again and Officer Britt reached gently for the clipboard and put it on the seat next to him. He started the car, eased away from the curb. Sanderson, watching his uncle's car slide out of sight, turned around for a last look at the house, but all he could see was the sculpture, which struck him in the weak light as monstrous, something evil he'd had a hand in creating. Sanderson felt his blood sugar dropping, his body begging for more booze, but he knew another drink would not take care of the emptiness he felt, as he'd given away some sacred private part of them to a stranger, a fucking cop.