“Looks like it’s really on there, huh?”
“No, no,” I said, bracing myself for another try, “don’t worry. It’s just”—again I heaved till I thought I could feel something give in my groin—“stuck, that’s all.”
It was at that moment, as if it had been choreographed by the Fates, as if all the hands of all the clocks that had measured time throughout history had been synchronized to mock that instant on that road on that day — it was then, when my guard was down and my passions piqued — that the CHP cruiser, revolving light aglow, glided silently up onto the shoulder behind us. I froze. Became a sculpture in living flesh: Man Changing Flat. Petra glanced up at the opaque window of the police car and put her hands to her hips.
The door of the car swung open and a glistening boot appeared. Then, six-two, one-eighty-five, as lean and tough as a strip of jerky and with every hair of his mustache clipped to regulation length, Officer Jerpbak emerged from the cruiser. He was carrying his summons book in one hand, and his mirror shades flashed malevolently. “What’s the problem here?”
“Nothing we can’t fix ourselves,” Petra said. Her voice had turned acid.
A pickup rattled by on the road, cloely tailed by a convertible that lurched into the outside lane with a blast of the throttle and then vanished in the distance. I straightened up — slowly, cautiously — still gripping the lugwrench and wondering what to do. Should I avert my face, throw my voice, drop the wrench and stroll casually back to the Toyota, start it up and drive off? The wrench weighed twelve tons, my heart was in my ears. Here he was, at long last, Jerpbak. Jerpbak the enforcer, Jerpbak the hound. In the flesh. “It’s just a flat tire, Officer,” I said, my voice hollow, withered, gone flat and out of key.
“Well,” said Jerpbak, ignoring me, “Miss Pandazopolos.” He sauntered up to the VW, put a foot on the bumper and thumbed through his summons book. “And her junk-wagon.”
“Oh, come on — get off my case, Jerpbak.” She flattened the final vowel until it trailed off in a bleat.
If to this point Jerpbak had seemed faintly amused, in the way of a nine-year-old with a bare wire and a pan of frogs, he turned abruptly serious. “In the car, lady,” he snapped. “I’m conducting a spot inspection of this vehicle right here and now.”
Petra fixed him with a stare of such intense, incendiary hatred I thought he’d burst into flame, and I realized with a thrill that she and I — that this fantastic, wide-mouthed, long-legged, dark-skinned, furious woman and I — had a bond in common. She opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jerpbak, impenetrable behind his shades, was already scribbling in his summons book, and she stalked round the car and slammed into the driver’s seat instead.
At this point, Jerpbak turned to me. “And who are you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“I’m nobody. I mean I, uh, just stopped to help when I, uh—?”
“You a local?”
“Me? No, no. Just passing through, never been here before in my life. I live in San Jose. With my mother.”
“Funny,” Jerpbak said, scratching meditatively in the dirt with the toe of his boot, “you look familiar.” And then he hit me with the question that gave me nightmares: “Ever been to Tahoe?”
“Where?”
“You hard of hearing? Tahoe. Lake Tahoe.”
Shit, I thought, and I felt something give way, a piece of elastic frayed to the breaking point. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been there.” And then: “Look, what’s this all about, anyway? You charging me with being a good Samaritan or what?”
There was a long silence. Jerpbak’s glasses were like the eyes of a predacious insect, huge, soulless, unfathomable. Drums thundered in my head, my chest was exploding, a truck shot by with a climactic whoosh. “I don’t like you,” Jerpbak said finally. “I don’t like your shirt or your shoes or your haircut or the tone of your voice. In fact, I like you so little that if you’re not in that piece-of-shit Toyota and out of here in thirty seconds flat, I am going to run your ass in. Don’t tempt me.” Then he turned his back: I was dismissed.
Jerpbak was hovering over Petra’s window now. She stared straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. “License and registration,” Jerpbak said. She didn’t move. He repeated himself.
Petra’s voice was soft. “Don’t do this,” she said.
“License and registration.”
“All right,” she said. “I forgot my license. It’s at home somewhere.”
I watched the back of Jerpbak’s head, studied the square of his shoulders. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take you in then,” he said. Take her in? I was stunned. The man’s psychotic, I thought. A bullyboy. A brownshirt.
“Shit!” Petra shouted, flinging herself from the car. “You know goddamn well I have a license — you’ve harassed me enough over it, haven’t you? How many tickets have you given me in the last three months? Huh? What do you mean I don’t have a license?” She was six inches from him, veins standing out in her neck, eyes throwing punches.
Jerpbak never flinched. He just stood there, erect as a ramrod, idly fingering the buffed leather of his holster and the hard plastic grip of his revolver. His voice was almost weary. “Up against the car,” he said.
She hesitated; he grabbed for her arm. Just that: he grabbed for her arm, and then spun her around. I don’t know what came over me — some misguided chivalric impulse, I suppose, or perhaps it was even more basic than that, something archetypal, primordial. Kill, fuck, eat, the id tells us, and sometimes we listen. In this instance it was all tied up with sex, of course. Would I have interfered if Petra had looked like Edith Sitwell or Nancy Reagan? I stepped forward. I think I said something penetrating like “Hey, no need to get rough,” and I may have reached out with the hazy notion of restraining Jerpbak’s arm — or no, I merely brushed him, that’s all. Accidentally.
Brushing, restraining — I could have clubbed him with the lug-wrench and it wouldn’t have been any different. One hundred and twenty seconds later I found myself handcuffed to Petra and seated in the rear of the cruiser, my wrist aching, knees cramped, heart hammering, and facing a probable string of charges ranging from interfering with a peace officer in the line of duty to assault, mayhem and attempted murder. The police radio chattered tonelessly, inanely, sun screamed through the windows. I watched as Jerpbak sauntered up to the Toyota and shook Gesh awake. I was as wrought up as a pit bull with blood in his nostrils.
Petra’s free hand reached out to pat my shackled one. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were wide and wet, stricken like the eyes of tear-gas victims. “It’s just that … this guy is crazy. He thinks that I … he, he persecutes me.” She leaned into me, and I could feel her body percolating with hurt and anger until the first sob rose in her throat. A moment later she broke down, sobs churning like waves on a beach, the very frame of the car heaving with the force of her emotion. I’d been thinking wildly of escape, of smashing Jerpbak and running for it, and then more somberly of lawyers and jail cells, the collapse of the summer camp and of how now, finally and irrevocably, I’d let my partners down — thinking of my own circumscribed and miserable self. Now, without thought or hesitation, as instinctively as I would reach out a hand to someone who’d fallen or hold open the door for a child with an armful of groceries, I drew up my free hand to take her shoulder and press her to me. What else could I have done?