Another Bump in the Road of Life

by June Pulliam

07/28/2006

Bailey, Dale, and Jack Slay, Jr. Sleeping Policemen. Urbana, IL: Golden Gryphon Press, 2006. 208 p.

If you hit someone with your car, it’s a good idea to call the police. Barring that, it’s a good idea to just get the hell away from the scene as fast as you can and hope that no one saw you. Perhaps this is the lesson to be learned from Sleeping Policemen.

A carload of college boys are driving back after a drunken outing in a strip club when they hit someone. At first, none of the car’s occupants is aware that they have hit anyone: later, when they mull that moment over in their minds, Finny, the driver, recalls that he saw a flicker of movement on the side of the road. Tucker, the passenger riding shot gun, saw nothing, and Nick, in the back seat, likewise saw nothing, but felt the impact. At the time, the phrase “sleeping policemen,” a term designating a speed bump, comes to Nick’s mind unbidden. During the next three days, the three will realize to what degree they have hit the mother of all speed bumps.

When the three begin to suspect that they might have hit someone, an argument ensues over whether or not they should return to the scene of impact and see if someone was actually injured. Finny, a senator’s son, is against the idea. As the driver he has the most to lose if it is discovered that he hit someone, since he had more than a few beers in him before he got behind the wheel, and his father would be most unhappy about the resulting publicity. Tucker too is against going back, since the hour is late and he has a test on Monday to study for. Nick, the only working class boy of the bunch, insists that they must return since they left skid marks which could possibly be traced, and if their identities were discovered through these means, then everything would be worse.

But things really go from bad to worse when they return to the scene of the accident. There they find a well dressed dead man with $10,000 and a key to a bus station locker in his pocket. Nick eagerly pockets the money, which he reasons can help him finance grad school, and takes the key as well before they hide the body in the snow on the side of the mountain road. But before they leave, they are passed by a slow moving car, apparently looking for someone on that stretch of highway at 2:00 in the morning, and the driver gets their license number and is later able to track them through it. Before noon, a mere 10 hours later, Nick is visited by a state trooper wanting to know if they know anything about a man found dead on the side of the road not far away. Nick feigns innocence, and after the trooper leaves, he and his friends track down the locker that the key fits and find a snuff film featuring the rape and murder of a daughter of a wealthy family. 

And so begins their ordeal, which takes place over the space of three sleepless days and is related in small increments of time similar to the narrative structure of the television series 24. Before the ambiguous and bloody conclusion, Nick will discover things about himself such as his own disturbing love of violence—when at first he becomes aroused watching the snuff film, and later, when his girlfriend is similarly inspired and wants him to slap her around during sex. Nick’s hidden propinquity will serve him well later when he must fight the blood-thirsty criminals he has pissed off.  

And here’s where things get a little predictable. From the first chapter, it was clear that Nick and his friends were in deep doo doo when they discovered $10,000 in the dead man’s pocket. And if the reader herself didn’t have sense enough to know that someone who walks around with this much cash in his pocket is more than likely involved with something illegal and violent, the characters did, and said as much, so naturally we know that the bad people are going to want their things back, and they won’t ask nicely. But of course, typical of the genre, this knowledge doesn’t stop them from doing the stupidest thing possible and taking the money anyway, and on top of that, satisfying their curiosity about what’s in the bus station locker. Is this the sort of horror where the protagonists fit the classic definition of the tragic hero: the person who knows better, but does the wrong thing—or in this case, the stupid thing—anyway?

But come to think of it, isn’t that pretty much every sort of horror?

I was also disappointed with the characters, who weren’t as well developed as I would have liked. Understandably, this is a plot driven novel, so characters are a bit broadly drawn. Moreover, Sleeping Policemen is not one of those plot driven monstrosities that I frequently fulminate about (when I can even get through them). These are generally published by a major imprint, and they occasioned at least one of my jeremiads last year. It seems in these types of novels the object is to squeeze in as much really stupid sex and violence as possible without caring that the plot has about as much narrative cohesion as your average porn flick. And the villain, the enormously fat Virgil Gutman, struck me as rather one dimensional as he really seems to enjoy torturing Nick’s girlfriend in order to convince him to return the incriminating video tape, and we don’t understand why he takes such pleasure in his work. A round character in girth only, Gutman is broadly drawn so as to create such flatness that Nick has little opportunity to understand the nature of Gutman’s business, let alone probe his own psyche.

To their credit, the authors tightly weave the plot, and its rapid pace permits the violence to affect the reader viscerally. For example, in one scene, Nick and his sleepless friends have stopped to have coffee after hiding the body of someone else they’ve accidentally killed, when one of their pursuers bursts through the door and casually shoots the proprietress in the head so as to leave no witnesses to what will happen next. The impact is similar to the effect in Fargo, where in one moment a distraught father is arguing over exchanging ransom money with his daughter’s kidnapper, and in the next second, an impossibly small pop sounds, and he is left looking mildly surprised as a red and leaking hole blooms in his chest.

While I won’t give away the ending, I will say that Sleeping Policemen did not conclude at the point in the narrative when such stories usually do—in order to provide some sort of closure. Furthermore, I don’t see this as a failing. Rather it is a strength, something that makes the story more original and striking, as well as real. The writers understand that any closure after such a violent and intense series of events would necessarily feel artificial, since for Nick and his friends, this is, believably so, just one of those experiences that changes a person forever.