Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

So here’s the story:

I’m doing NaNo in the mornings and AKMG at night and finishing up galleys, and two houseguests just left (although Krissie is really family, not guest), and another houseguest is coming tomorrow (Samantha Graves who is going to do NaNo with us–yay!–and cook for us-YAY!!!), plus we have doctor’s appointments and teacher conferences and general maintenance to do around here, and I do not have time to write a real blog post. I love you all, but there’s a limit. So here’s my first day’s NaNo. I’ve made a couple of passes at it since I wrote it because I read the earlier stuff to get my mind in gear for writing the next day, but this is pretty much it. It’s NaNo so you don’t get to critique it. It’s not a draft, it’s a NaNo daily word count. It’s up here so you can chat about NaNo in the comments. This will pretty much be the story for the rest of this month: placeholder posts so you have the comments to play in. I’d apologize, but I don’t have time. Love to all . . .

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I saw the Welcome to Birney sign at about 10:30 one bright spring morning when the air was crisp with the scent of new rain, which is when I lost my nerve and gunned the car and watched the road to my mother’s house go by with some guilt and more relief. My mother’s a lovely woman—well, okay, no, she’s not, but she’s not a beast, either—but the whole Birney thing and the bears and the that’s-all-right-I’ll-just-sit-here-alone-in-the-dark . . . I just couldn’t do it. So I had the CRX going about eighty when I heard the siren. I looked in the rear view mirror and decided that the cop had to be after me since there were no other cars around, it being a Sunday in Birney and all, and I pulled over to the edge of the highway.

I shoved back the five-foot purple teddy bear in the passenger seat so I could open the glove department, praying that whoever was about to bust me didn’t know me. I’d been gone for twelve years. It was possible. When I popped open the compartment, a bunch of papers slithered out before I could catch them, and I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over to sort through the mess on the floor just as somebody knocked on my window.

At first all I could see was an expanse of uniformed chest surprisingly unsupported by a beer gut, but then I rolled down the window and looked up and thought, Thank you, God. He wasn’t anybody I knew, although he fit the general description of “Birney Guy”: a good old midwestern boy with more chin than forehead, his eyes narrowed in paranoid suspicion over a nose that had been broken at least once. If you’d asked me to put money on it, I’d have bet that his knees were gone, too. We like our high school football rough in Ohio, so we tend to maim our young.

I smiled. Ten years on the road had taught me that you do not argue with cops because they’re always going to win. Plus if they pick you up, you were speeding. Shut up and pay the fine.

He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look particularly upset, either. And when he said, “Ma’am, do you realize you were going eighty-three in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone?” he sounded more bored than anything else. Well, he was doing highway traffic in Birney on a Sunday morning.

“Yes, officer,” I said, holding onto that smile. “I just wasn’t thinking. I apologize and I certainly won’t do it again.” Because I’m never coming back here again, so really, no more speeding in Birney for me.

He gave me a yeah-right-sure-you-won’t look and held out his hand, and said, “License and registration, please.”

I got my license out of my billfold and handed it to him, and said, “I’ll be just a second with that registration.” I shoved the bear back again, stuck my head between its legs and into the space under the dashboard, and went through a couple of dozen old repair bills, insurance cards, and expired registrations before I found the current one. When I straightened up again, he had bent down to look through the window.

“Nice bear,” he said with a straight face.

“Thank you.” I handed him the registration.

He took it and looked at it and then at the license. “Your name is Elizabeth Danger?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any relation to Maribeth Danger?”

Oh, hell. “She’s my mother.” And I’m sure whatever she’s done, she’s sorry.

He nodded. “I’ll be right back.”

He walked back to his cruiser, and I watched him in my side mirror to see if he was going to call my license in. He had a great butt, but that was peripheral to the fact that he got in the car and of course he was going to call it in. It didn’t matter, though, because I was going to take the ticket, mail in the fine, and never come back here again, so really, anything that happened next was immaterial and irrelevant and nothing at all to worry about.

The worst thing about traffic stops is the waiting. You’re sitting there like an idiot while people drive past—even in Birney on a Sunday morning if you sit long enough, somebody will drive past—and you really can’t do much because the cop’s going to come back, so you’re stuck with your thoughts. My thoughts were generally Fucking Birney, and This is my own fault for coming back here, and I could have taken the northern route to Chicago, and I could use some breakfast, and I wonder if it looked like I was blowing that bear, and Fucking Birney, and What the hell has Mom done that the cops know her? and That cop was kind of cute in a Neanderthal kind of way, and It’s going to cost me a fortune to mail this damn bear, and Anemone hasn’t called me in twenty-four hours, maybe somebody stole her phone, and Fucking Birney. Well, you get my drift. You can’t do anything worthwhile because at any minute—

He knocked on the window again and I rolled it down.

“I called it in. Mike Crider says hi.” He passed back my registration and license.

“You tell him I said hi back,” I said, thinking, Oh, hell.

“He says to tell you he still remembers that polka dot bikini,” the cop said, deadpan, which got him points in my book.

“Yeah, well, those days are gone.”

“He wants to know if you’re in town for the wedding.”

“There’s a wedding?”

“I’ll tell him no.” He sounded bored now, just dutifully passing along the messages. “He also said not to give you a ticket.”

“Good old Mike,” I said, with real enthusiasm. “Tell him I said thank you.”

“The sheriff says you should tell your mother hi for him.”

I kept my mouth shut on that one. Whatever was going on with my mother and the sheriff I didn’t want to know about, especially since I had no idea who the sheriff was now. The last one had been older than God, so he had to be retired.

“No message for the sheriff?”

The cop had been decent up to now, so I said, “Here’s the truth. I was coming home to visit and decided I didn’t want to, and that’s why I gunned the car, and once I’m done here, I’m going to keep on trucking, so I won’t be telling my mother anything for awhile.”

He nodded. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to say, ‘I sure will say hi’?”

“That would have been a lie. No good ever comes from lying.”

His eyebrows went up on that one, but then he was a cop, so he probably figured everybody lied. Then he said, “Is your mom going to worry when you don’t show up?”

“She didn’t know I was coming.” I glanced at the bear beside me. “It was going to be a surprise.”

He nodded. “Then you’re good to go.”

“Uh,” I began, and he waited. “Could you ask Mike and the sheriff not to tell my mother . . .” I stopped when I realized how lame that was. I’m thirty-three and I’m asking the cops not to tell my mother I got busted. “Never mind.”

“Too late anyway. The grapevine here makes sound look slow.”

He sounded kind of surprised by that, like he was still getting used to it, so I said, “You’re not from here, are you?”

“No.”

“So how did you end up here? People usually leave this place, not move in.”

He frowned at me a little, and I remembered I wasn’t the one who was supposed to ask the questions.

“Sorry,” I told him. “I’m used to interviewing people. Forget I asked that. Thank you very much for not giving me a ticket. You’re a good person. I hope you enjoy living in Birney.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, and stepped away from the car.

I turned the ignition key and the car sputtered, as usual, and then the engine kicked in, as usual. Good old CRX, I thought. Like the sheriff, the car was older than God, but Hondas kept on going and I intended to drive this one forever. I stepped on the gas pedal and my tires spun.

Hell. It had rained and now I was in mud. Well, not a problem. I looked in the rear view and saw that the highway was still deserted except for the cop in the car behind me, so I floored it. The car spurted out of the mud and onto the highway, fishtailing a little, and then it coughed in mid-surge and died.

I steered it back onto the shoulder using the last of its momentum and tried to restart it. No go. I tried again. No go. No, no, no, I thought, not in Birney, and cranked the ignition again but there was nothing there.

I put my head on the steering wheel.

Two minutes later, the cop knocked on the window.

I rolled it down.

“How bad is it?” he said.

“I think it’s dead.”

He nodded. “I can call the Dobbses.”

The Dobbses. In their blue pick-up truck. Kenny Dobbs had tried to feel me up in the front seat of that pick-up truck. Way Dobbs had done more than that in the front seat of that pick-up truck. His mom Annie had baby-sat me. I’d baby-sat his little sister Patsy.

“Or not,” the cop said.

“That would be . . . fine. Thank you.”

“How about this,” he said. “I give you a ride into town, you talk to the Dobbses in person and ask them to keep it quiet, nothing gets on the police scanner, and with any luck you’ll be back on the road by lunch.”

I squinted up at him, back lit as he was by the sun. He mostly looked monolithic, and his ears kind of stuck out, but I was warming up to him. This was a man who understood the importance of avoiding family. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind of you.”

He opened the door for me, and I got out and got my first really good look at him. He still looked like Birney Guy until you looked up into his eyes and realized there was something going on there. He’d give good interview, I thought, and then he said, “Don’t forget the bear.”

“I have to bring the bear?”

“You want to leave a giant bear in an abandoned car on a highway?”

I thought about it. If somebody stole the damn thing, I wouldn’t have to mail it to my mother. But it had cost six hundred dollars and some change. It was a quandary.

“An abandoned giant bear is begging for a smash and grab,” the cop said.

“Right.” I went around to the passenger side of the car and tugged on the bear. I’d jammed it in there before I’d left Philadelphia the day before, but evidently in Philadelphia I’d had more muscle mass. “Damn.” I put the bear’s arm around my neck, tried to get my arm around its non-existent waist, and pulled again. A third yank and it popped out, and I stumbled back and lost my balance and let go as I flailed my way down the embankment and fell on my butt in the mud.

When I looked up, the cop was holding the bear. “It’s fine,” he said. “I got it before it hit the ground.”

“Fabulous,” I said.

He hauled the bear back to his squad car while I climbed to my feet, examined the damage—there was a laundromat in my future—and began Plan B. The Dobbses had a bathroom at the garage. I could change there, wash out the worst of the dirt in the sink, and hit a laundromat when I stopped for lunch. I wiped the worst of the mud off on my jeans and began the crawl back up the embankment, and when I looked up, the cop was there again, holding out his hand.

I looked at my hand and said, “Mud,” and showed him.

“No problem,” he said, his hand still extended, so I put my dirty paw in his nice clean cop hand and let him drag me up onto the highway.

Once I got there, I held on for a moment. It was just good to have something to hold onto for a change.

“I’m Liz,” I said.

“I’m Vince,” he said.

“Vince, I’m going to get mud in your car.”

“You can sit in the back with the bear,” he said, and that’s how I came home to Birney after twelve years gone, sitting beside a giant purple bear in the back of a cop car, praying nobody would notice.