“Listen Pappa, there he goes again.”

The girl rushed to grab a view through the north window of the old Iowa farmhouse, but only saw the wide sea of corn reaching the horizon. She dashed the length of the house. From the hall she heard it again. With tingling anxiety, she lurched for the front door and fumbled the lock, only to find the last of the diminishing growl and two burning lights disappearing into the August night.

Julie stood in the darkening front yard. The air stilled, the broken shafts of straw settled back to the rest at the roadside, and the peepers resumed their call.

She had grown a deep fascination in this young man who piloted his spooky car all night long through the countryside. What was he looking for?

Too hot to sleep, the southern sky shakes wit heat lighting.

Julie threw herself into a chair. “They say he comes from the city, some see him a’tearing past. The Cruiser, The Night Cruiser, they call him.”

She once managed to get outside, by the big maples in front of the house, in time to see him a-racing by, and she waved at him. A tight, awkward wave bristling with unease. She got a glimpse of him that time, through the windshield behind the wheel, serious, then she thought, he smiled, and he was gone. He was real.

From her father in the front room came a needless reply, “Julie, school’s tomorrow. Have you done your dishes yet? Well, do them, then you better get on to bed. Never mind the kid out there.”

Franklin tried to be a good father, but he never made it. He wasn’t around enough to be a parent. Someday it’ll be different, he told himself. He hurt every time he thought of her out here alone all by herself.

“I’ll get them in a minute, Pa”, the girl called back.

In her upstairs bedroom, with her elbows on the windowsill under the gable end of the house, she sat on the floor. The pea-green window shade slowly swung its pull ring in and out of the open window above the country road, which now sat still and heavy.

At the road’s far end was life, city life, eighty miles away, two hours by bus which would stop right here for her and take her down that black highway between the tall rows of corn. Her bare knees pushed beneath her nightdress on the rippled wooden floor. Her slim arms folded on the worn, rough window ledge; her cheek rested there as her thoughts fled out into the night.

She quietly moved down the wooden stairs in her bare feet and into the kitchen. It was late August, and a hot one, new record says the TV. A glow from Pappa’s desk lamp in the front room, blue-white fluorescent over the dirty dishes in the sink, balls of insects zipping around the porch light. Ten o’clock and it was still in the mid-nineties.

Her long, straight hair reached to the greasy water her arms worked. Untouched school homework lay on the kitchen table. She knew her Pappa didn’t think much about her school, and he was never home anyway. No mother to tell her about girl things. School was bad and getting worse; she didn’t do the work, notes from her teacher to her Pappa were unopened. She had long forsaken any kind of media connection, nothing there, nothing real. They’d probably hold her back a grade. No friends out here in the cornfields, and the only guys who would take her out, she would have nothing to do with. Pappa’s always working and Momma’s gone, gone. She had walked out the front door when Julie was eight, leaving the lights on and the door open.

The only flicker of substance left for Julie were those burning lights on the road.

At ten-thirty, the desk light snapped out. Her Pappa was off again. She followed him out into the side yard where his big, red truck, standing almost as high as her bedroom window, was slowly pulling out onto the county road. He always told her he would take her sometime, out to all those places - San Francisco, New York, Chicago. He leaned out of the cab window in front of her house.

“You be good now, Julie. Go in now, and I’ll be back in five days. Mrs. Batten will look in on you every so often.”

“Bye, Pappa. I’ll soon be in bed. Will you take me next time?”

“Sure, sweetie,” and the truck, large as a tractor shed, moved off into the summer night.

Lonesome was not enough word to tell of the depth of her despair. IT was a vast, hollow inside her body that caused her arms to fall loose without any anchorage. Her head was untethered above her shoulders. It was impossible for her to go back into that stifling, horrible house.

Where the big maples edged the county road, she threw herself on the bumpy, thin grass in the moon shade of the leafy branches above. On her back, looking at the blanched sky behind the black trees, which covered the center of the dark tunnel of her life, she stretched her arms wide over the ground and her tears overflowed onto the dry dirt of the dusty lawn to make tiny pools of dewy water.

Into the flooded eyes, looking at the night sky came a small far-off sense, a perceived ancient cognition. Down the rows of corn, over the black highway, she sensed it before she heard it, she heard it before she saw it. Over the night sounds, the cricket and peepers and the shifting corn stalks, came an almost unheard thumping like the small animal’s heartbeat. Her eyes flashed wide open in the dark; she raised up on one elbow. The heart beating became a small vibration, then distant thunder. She rolled toward the roadway gravel to see two pinhole points of light on the road’s horizon. Now, she was on her knees, and then her feet were running to the road, and the pin lights became two burning orbs surrounded by unmuffled exhaust, flat out thumping through the countryside, a crackling explosion now.

*****************************

His origins were chartless, some Latino, Puerto Rican, city-black and country-white. With his long dreadlocks and pocketed knife, always at his side within easy reach, he was not a man to meet on a back street after dark. Romero had no champions. He had little family. He was as much a loner as could be in any city. He avoided the police, drugs, friends and any kin, as he shoveled dirt and broke concrete. He dug holes in the city streets for $13 dollars and fifty cents. He was a nameless shoveling machine the foreman ignored. They lived on the fifth floor in an old, red brick tenement. Romero was just another dark figure moving in the steaming summer canyons of the old city.

Few would have suspected that there could have been a secret behind the sullen boy. Romero lived for the night. He endured all the assaults to his body and mind over the long, hot day so that his soul might be unleashed at night.

After sunset, this shadowy laborer became a notorious fable.

Come evening, after his hot, blistered hands were cooled in the basin of water, his heels clattered down the iron stairs onto the broken asphalt of the alley below the back window. Hedged with decaying brick buildings and refuse, the alley passed an old garage a few paces away. Romero leased the sagging structure from an absentee landlord in exchange for some maintenance. Behind two battered wooden doors was the machine that gave his soul its nourishment. It was an old Detroit two-door car with a huge V8 engine, long ago given up by the white collars in the suburbs. Romero had removed the muffler and, with spray cans, painted the entire car flat black. During the day as the somber boy shoveled, the ugly, black car waited.

In the dark of the garage, behind the steering wheel, with the keys in his hand, then in the ignition, and the gas pedal pressing beneath his foot, an alchemy was performed. As the engine leaped into life with a bellow, the boy was transmuted into a mythical being. The city stench of the summer night was flushed through the opened windows as the Night Cruiser bolted out between shattered lamp posts and empty storefronts into the country air. Now, down hard on the gas, pushing the old car through the sleeping towns so fast that he was in the next one before the thumping rap had roused the last one.

All night long he cruises down the baseline road the baseline road squaring off the townships. Eight-five, ninety-five, one-hundred-ten miles an hour shoving his right foot into the big, four-barrel carburetor. Rabbit eyes glinted, a soft bump. A deer over a rise, in the middle of the road, like a spinning dancer, the car wound around the deer twice and stopped harmlessly in the farm dirt. He sizzled past single yellow lamp posts, empty country crossroads and an occasional late evening farm truck so fast that the farmer’s heads turned the wrong way to see him. He was never caught.

One evening, down a county road, past the oceans of corn, over a rise, Romero suddenly found a kindred soul in the blackness, who knew him so well, no names were necessary. There, beneath the maple trees and by the old house, was a white moth with long hair and bare feet running to meet him. How did she know?

At dawn, he will return to the city, the alley and the broke garage. The car will tick as it cools and the boy will wipe his dirt and tear-stained face with his sleeve as the sun shows he’ll dry his sticky palms to pick up his shovel again.

Romero has never known a daytime life. When the sun is up, he’s an empty vessel with a shovel. Only the night can unfold his soul and wash away the creature who works the streets. As the car surges through the shattered city into the open, the winds wash away that voided life and the man who breaks concrete.

To the folks of the country, in a hundred-mile radius of the city, Romero is a living legend. In small towns, where the kids are up later than they should be and gathered by the buzzing neon at the all-night cafe to pass a point. All talk stops the moment they hear the rumble bouncing off the grange hall and closed movie house. They had been hoping for this, even a blurred glimpse was a thrill as the enigmatic black car accelerated past them doing the turn by the coffee shop at one-hundred-five miles an hour with the police a full mile behind. Week after week, the police set roadblocks on country roads parallel to and five miles from the one that Night Cruiser moves over faster than lightening.

He lingers in the country folk’s minds at all times. The guys sit at their school desks during math lessons, but are behind his steering wheel looking at the road disappearing beneath the long, flat, black hood. The girls whispered and floated their needy questions about. They nod with excitement in their eyes. Even the farmers and their wives admit to a grudging wonderment.

Now, on this night on the side of the road, under the dark trees, Julie, a white moth in her nightdress, is pulled by an unknown force into his speeding headlights. Seeing the gossamer figure of the girl flying towards him, the Night Cruiser chucks the steering wheel away. Burning lacerated tires move sideways on the rough macadam road. The fenders gave up their form to her body, and the girl flew through the air, her eyes fixed on the infinitely dark sky. The angry black car bends around the maple tree, and the boy turns over and over and over and over and lands among the corn rows in the soft dirt just next to her. They touch hands, smile, and close their eyes.

The dawn finds only the ugly, black car against the tree. Julie and the Night Cruiser are gone.