Russian Brides was easier, these were women on a different continent, and none, as far as he knew, had ever stolen a car from outside a Walgreens so that they could try to rob a store with a starting pistol. He didn't even think they had branches of Walgreens in Russia. Sylvia looked almost demure, but had promise and he was sure she'd never sharpen a clothes peg and stick it in someone's thigh, at least not without good reason. A friend asked him if he knew that all those Russian dating sites were run by the Russian mob and that most of the girls were under the cosh of organised crime. He had to ask him what cosh meant, but he knew it was nothing good. The next time he wrote to Sylvia he asked if she was in trouble, and if she was labouring under an unforgiving regime and she replied that it was no more unforgiving that the one she'd grown up with. He was confused and couldn't tell if she was joking or not. Is there anything you want to tell me, he wrote and could hear his voice hissing in his head as if not to be overheard in some way. Only that I like your eyes, she responded and her connection to the machinations of the Russian underground were never mentioned again.
To reach Verkhoturye he had to fly into Ekaterinburg (Ural's buzzing capital, as the guidebooks described it), via Moscow. By the time he'd landed he felt as though he'd been in the air for days and the staunch pain in his lower back made him wonder if the hostess had kicked him while he'd slept. He perused his guidebook as the plane emptied, alighting on the words, buzzing and metropolis, though very little appeared to be moving outside his window. Sylvia, her mother and a man who remained ominously silent met him at the airport. It was early autumn and bitterly cold and Sylvia and her mother were pale, unreadable faces swathed in hats and scarves. His coat flapped uselessly about him as they crossed the tarmac and his eyes streamed in the unremitting wind. Over the next few days he discovered that it was not only the monastery but the cathedral that was fortified too. He tried making a joke about both iconic buildings being two of the most heavily defended sanctuaries he'd ever seen, though Sylvia only looked confused and the quiet man just stared at him with contempt. He saw numerous caves and lakes, he spent an afternoon at Zone No. 145 where the Russians developed their nuclear weapons and one day even travelled five kilometres out of town to bear witness to a memorial dedicated to the slain victims of Stalin's repression (this was translated to him loudly from the grand-looking brass plate by Sylvia). All things considered, he thought, he couldn't blame Sylvia for wanting to leave her home. The fauna, as predicted, was fulsome and startling, as were most of the two hundred national parks throughout South Ural (he felt like he saw them all), but it wasn't enough to tie you to a place made infamous as the valley where the former Soviet Union conceived their weapons of mass destruction. And the wind, he thought, as his hair fell into his eyes for the thousandth time, the wind was inhuman.
They called it a dowry, but it was really a fee, a price tag that he paid for Sylvia, and even while they celebrated with caustic-tasting wine and cake hard enough to knock a stranger out if you'd lobbed it into a crowd, he found himself feeling dirty and tragic that it had come to this. He stepped outside and looked on the ruddy beauty of the valley he was standing in, the distant shimmer of a lake could sometimes be glimpsed like a promise. Evening was falling and tomorrow he would return to California and wait for Sylvia to come to banish the shadows that haunted him, take away the crippling fear and loss in his guts. She joined him on the steps of her house as her mother and the ever-silent man worried the curtain to stand in the window behind them and watch their every move. She linked an arm through his and he wondered why he'd come all this way to a place he could neither spell nor say to find hope in a face he'd found peeking out of his computer monitor so many months before.
Are you happy, she asked him, and all he could do was nod as he tasted the tears that had reached his mouth.
It had been over two years since he woke up in his chair and knew that she'd gone. He tried to stay sleeping to stave off the inevitable realisation like a child who hides its eyes and tells you that you can't see them because they can't see you. He couldn't explain it, but he knew the knock at the door was a policeman and he knew that the policeman would be crying. His neighbour was standing with the policeman; he looked like he'd been punched hard in the stomach by circumstance.
It's Lulu, said his neighbour, but he already knew that too. He let the policeman in and his neighbour too, but his neighbour loitered by the living room door and quietly let himself out with a nod before the policeman had finished speaking.
I'm sorry, said the policeman. He believed he was too.
There was a shooting out on the highway, the policeman said.
He nodded mutely, had someone shot his wife? Why would someone shoot Lulu?
We were chasing a suspect, we were chasing his car, we think he ran a small boy down and didn't stop.
He was numb; someone had run a child down and not stopped? He wondered where their son Charlie was and if he was safe, but Charlie was away in college miles from here. The policeman was still talking to him; he seemed lost in his own thoughts.
We chased the car down, he said, we chased him for miles, he was out of control and then when we managed to stop him, we blew his tyres out, we ran a strip of spikes across the road, it wasn't him. It was the wrong car, it wasn't the man we were after, it was some guy, he was drunk or on dust or something, he was insane, screaming and shouting and as we corralled him with our cars and got him down someone started firing at us from a long way off, up on the hills some place. Someone with a high-powered rifle, we think, someone who knew what he was doing.
The policeman had a cut from shaving just underneath his chin that he worried absently with his right hand.
We don't know who he was, the policeman said. He fired on us and then he started firing on the cars that were passing us so they'd crash into us, we think, that they'd pile up and cause a commotion . . .
Did he get away?
The policeman shrugged helplessly.
He imagined Lulu in her green Impala slowing down as the traffic built up before her and the police lights flashed red and blue in the anaemic Californian sky. He could see the policeman waving the traffic down, slowing the snaking cars as they pulled their suspect to the ground. People were rubbernecking, gawking as the man disappeared beneath a brace of police bodies like prey being pulled down by a pack of lions. The cop waving down traffic swatted suddenly at his shoulder as if he'd been stung and then thrown violently to one side as the blood bloomed through his shirt and his eyes got wide. Then Lulu in her car hearing the sound of the bullets, high and whining as car windows started to shatter and the policemen fell to the floor, their legs kicking out like dogs dreaming, screams and orders being shouted at the same time, someone shunting into her as her car engine roared and then whined and then more bullets thudding noisily into the bodywork, the paint popping off in thick silver and green buttons. A bullet crashing through her window and she felt foolish for jumping as the window cracked and then the next shot hitting her in the neck and her car swerving into the nearest police car, setting off its siren in a lazy, droning wail. More shots ringing out and then there was just the sound of panic and terror filling the air. Some cars sliding almost lazily into the back of those already piled up, adding to the broken jigsaw of vehicles that were spread unevenly across the highway. Then the noise subsiding and smoke spreading through the air and towards the distant hills, leaving only the wailing of urgent sirens distilling the slowly undulating Californian air.
The policeman sat silently across from him, a notepad set on his knee. He fished a card out of his top pocket and handed it across to him, it had a number and his name printed on it in bold black ink. He let himself out as his neighbour let himself back in and stood gingerly over him.
Lulu, he said and let himself be held as emptiness rushed through him and took the strength in his arms and legs away and made him momentarily blind.
There was a photo of her coffin being carried to the grave in the papers, the dead policeman too, his was wrapped in an American flag, they'd been buried miles apart but it had been on the same warm afternoon. Guns saluted his descent into the earth, dirt peppering the lid of the casket sounded hers. Charlie and his girlfriend were there, his neighbours, Lulu's stepmother too and in the distance someone shooting at them but this time with a camera. He went to counselling after Charlie had stayed as long as he could. He couldn't believe that he had to go on alone, that she wouldn't be in the next room when he entered it, he sat up late at night with a blunt-looking revolver before him on the nest of tables, other nights he nursed a bottle of unopened whisky as boxes of painkillers sat strewn on the shelf next to framed portraits of her passing through her unimaginably short life. They were props though; he was magnifying his situation, trying to create a scenario he imagined a widower might need to go through. His pain was real but it was so all-encompassing and unwieldy that he had no idea how to deal with it. He had a very real ache in his shoulders and neck for months that a psychologist insisted was imagined and a symptom of his grief and anguish, but regardless of the diagnosis he'd still wake each day by sitting up and wincing as the pain rattled through him like old coins in a tin can.
He started online dating at a friend's insistence, but balked at the idea of going out and meeting other people, he'd barely left the house for weeks as it was, only yielding to the pleas of his neighbour to at least take a walk when the weather became unbearably hot and even the full icy impact of his air conditioning couldn't disguise the welcome of the glimmering world outside. If he didn't enjoy the actual idea of dating he did begin to welcome the attention of the people he met on the internet. It would start with emails and in one or two cases instant messaging conversations that went on late into the night. It reminded him of Lulu and the evenings they'd sit together and listen to mixes of music that they'd made each other. They'd applaud the other, sometimes playfully, or coo over a choice the other had made that had significant relevance for them both. He found the Women in Prison website late one night when he couldn't sleep and at first presumed it was porn, but was touched by the testimonials from the inmates on the site looking for someone to write to. Then one morning when the day's new light had brought him around in the same chair again he decided to dedicate himself to a new wife, to blot out the past as much as he could. He couldn't kill himself and he couldn't go on so instead he chose an indifferent middle where he could idle, and for that he'd need someone he neither loved nor hated, but would be around as long as he needed and act as a buffer between him and the wounded, desperate world he now found himself in. That was when he found Russian Brides and Sylvia. Charlie objected, worried that his father's grief had driven him mad, and no matter how many times he explained it to his son, he couldn't believe this temporary state, this sticking plaster, could be what his father truly wanted.
It isn't, he told Charlie, but it's all there is.
He went to the airport to meet Sylvia and her mother who'd be living with them for the first month until her daughter settled in to her new surroundings. He studied the Arrivals board and saw that their plane had landed early and as he stood in the main hall he saw them and their trolley piled high with suitcases before they saw him. He stepped back into an alcove and out of sight as they came closer, offered up a silent prayer to Lulu, tried to rub the redness out of his eyes and then he sprang forward, arms held wide and smiling as his new wife quickened her pace to meet him across the polished white floor.
Chorus
His father had caught him with one of his magazines when he was thirteen. He'd been staring at it transfixed in his room, but privacy wasn't an issue to his father.
My house, he used to say going through every door like it was a challenge.
What the fuck is this? his dad demanded, snatching the issue of Girls, Girls, Girls from his hands and holding it up to the light as if the transparency of the page might give something away, like the watermark on a dollar bill did. His father held his pose for a moment and then his eyes focused in on something on the page. He touched the spot on the page gently with his finger and then withdrew it slowly.
Cute, he said. Where did you get this? There was a pause and then his father spoke again. One of mine, yeah? He sat down next to him on his bed without waiting for an answer.
I'd have shown you this stuff if you said you wanted to see it, he said, but don't go sneaking around in my things, you never know what you might find. He stood up and then paused at the door. Don't tell your mother, he said and threw the magazine at him, causing it to bounce off his chest and spill out across the floor.
Hands! shouted his father as he retreated down the hall, you took your eye off it, hands!
Every time the driver turned the police radio on there was one emergency after another being dispatched. When he listened more closely, ignoring the constant calls coming over the air for him, he realised it was just one emergency: the pile-up on the highway, his pile-up on the highway. They were talking about the shooting and its aftermath. He was staying off the main roads momentarily, but he could still hear the constant whirr of helicopters passing overhead, racing back towards the vehicles and bodies he'd left strewn across three lanes. Ambulance and police sirens wailed in the distance and he wondered how many were dead. He was sure he'd done for a handful of drivers and their passengers, but he wasn't so sure about how many policemen he'd killed. Not even the first one he'd got in the shoulder. It was a very powerful rifle, though; he imagined the impact would have caused massive trauma and damage, surely enough to kill him. He thought about the bullet zigzagging through the policeman's body, ricocheting from bone to bone before exiting in a cloud of red smoke. He was, however, disappointed to note that the shot hadn't even knocked his sunglasses off his stupid fucking head. The police got out of the way pretty quickly, he thought, leaving all those people, all those taxpayers, out there unprotected in their cars. To serve and protect, he thought, to serve and fucking protect.