Authors: James Sallis
Drive (4 page)
“I’m gonna run across and grab something to eat,” Blanche said. “I saw a Pizza Hut over there and I’m starved. Sausage and extra cheese okay?”
“Sure,” he said, standing near the door, by one of those picture windows on aluminum tracks that all motels seem to have. The lower left corner had sprung out of the frame and he could feel warm air from outside pouring in. They were in a second-floor room facing front, with only the balcony, stairway and twenty yards or so of parking lot between them and the interstate. The motel itself had three separate exits. One ramp onto the interstate was off the intersection beyond the parking lot. Another was just up the street.
First thing you do, room, bar, restaurant, town or crib, is check and memorize the ways out.
Earlier, road weary, bodies vibrating from far too many hours in the car, they’d watched a movie on TV, a caper film set in Mexico with an actor who’d been big for about three days before sinking into drugs, guest-star gigs in films like this one shot on the cheap, and the meager, trailing fame of tabloid headlines.
Driver marveled at the power of our collective dreams. Everything gone to hell, the two of them become running dogs, and what do they do? They sit there watching a movie. Couple of chase scenes, Driver’d be willing to swear it was Shannon driving. Never saw him, of course. But definitely his style.
Has to be Blanche, Driver thought, standing by the window. No other way that Chevy was down there in the parking lot.
She’d taken a brush out of her purse and started into the bathroom.
He heard her say “What—”
Then the dull boom of the shotgun.
Driver went in around Blanche’s body, saw the man in the window, then slipped in blood and slammed into the shower stall, shattering the glass door and ripping his arm open. The man still struggled to free himself. But now he was lifting the gun again and swinging it towards Driver, who, without thinking, picked up a piece of the jagged glass and threw. It hit the man full on in the forehead. Pink flesh flowered there, blood poured into the man’s eyes, and he dropped the shotgun. Driver saw the razor by the sink. He used it.
The other one was doing his best to kick the door in. That’s what Driver had been hearing all along without realizing what it was, that dull drumming sound. He broke through just as Driver came back into the room—just in time for the shotgun’s second load. Thing was maybe twenty inches long and it kicked like a son of a bitch, doing more damage to his arm. Driver could see flesh and muscle and bone in there.
Not that he was complaining, mind you.
999
Sitting with his back against the wall in a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, Driver watched blood lapping toward him. Traffic sounds rolled in from the interstate. Someone wept in the next room. He realized he’d been holding his breath, listening for sirens, for the sound of people gathering on stairways or down in the parking lot, for the scramble of feet beyond the door, and took a deep draw of room air gone foul with the smell of blood, urine, feces, cordite, fear.
Neon flashed on the skin of the tall, pale man near the door.
He heard the drip of the tub’s faucet from the bathroom.
He heard something else as well, a scratching, a scrabbling, more drumlike sounds. Realized at length that it was his own arm jumping involuntarily, knuckles rapping at the floor, fingers scratching and thumping as the hand contracted.
The arm hung there, apart from him, unconnected, like an abandoned shoe. When Driver willed it to move, nothing happened.
Worry about that later.
He looked back at the open door. Maybe that’s it, Driver thought. Maybe no one else is coming, maybe it’s over. Maybe, for now, three bodies are enough.
After four months at Shannon’s he’d put away enough money to move out to his own place, an apartment complex in old east Hollywood. The check Driver wrote for deposit and rent was the first he’d written in his life and among the last. Soon enough he learned to operate on cash, stay off the radar, leave as few footprints as possible. “Good God, we’re in a Forties movie,” Shannon said when he saw the place. “Which apartment’s Marlowe live in?” Except that, these days, sitting out on the plank-like balcony, one heard far more Spanish than English.
He’d been coming up the stairs when the door next to his opened and a woman asked, in perfect English but with the unmistakable lilt of a native Spanish speaker, if he needed any help.
Seeing her, a Latina roughly his age, hair like a raven’s wing, eyes alight, he wished to hell he did need help. But what he had in his arms was about everything he owned.
“How about a beer, then?” she asked when he admitted to it. “Help you recover from all that heavy lifting.”
“That, I could do.”
“Good. I’m Irina. Come over whenever you’re ready. I’ll leave the door ajar.”
Minutes later, he stepped into her apartment, a mirror image, really, of his own. Soft music playing in three-quarter time, something with accordion fills and frequent appearances of the word corazon. Driver remembered once hearing a jazz musician claim that waltz time was the closest thing to the rhythm of the human heart. Sitting on a couch identical to his though considerably cleaner and more worn, Irina watched a soap opera on one of the Spanish-language TV channels. Novellas, they called them. They were huge.
“Beer on the table here, you want it.”
“Thanks.”
Settling onto the couch beside her, he smelled her perfume, smelled the morning’s soap and shampoo and the smell of her body beneath, subtler and solider at the same time.
“New in town?” she asked.
“Been here a few months. Staying with a friend till now.”
“Where are you from?”
“Tucson.”
Expecting the usual remarks about cowboys, he was surprised when she said, “I’ve got a couple of uncles and their families living out there. South Tucson, I think they call it? Haven’t seen them in years.”
“That’s a world apart, South Tucson.”
“Like L.A. isn’t?”
It was for him.
How much more for her?
Or for this child that came staggering sleepily out of the bedroom.
“Yours?” he said.
“These tend to come with the apartment. Place is overrun with roaches and children. Probably want to check your closets, look under kitchen counters.”
She stood, scooped the child up on one arm.
“This is Benicio.”
“I’m four,” the boy said.
“And very stubborn about going to bed.”
“How old are you?” Benicio asked.
“Good question. Okay if I call my mom, check in with her about this?”
“Meanwhile,” Irina said, “we’ll get you a cookie and a glass of milk out in the kitchen.”
Minutes later, they returned.
“Well?” Benicio said.
“Twenty, I’m afraid,” Driver told him. He wasn’t, but that’s what he was telling the world.
“Old.” Just as he’d suspected.
“Sorry. Maybe we can still be friends, though?”
“Maybe.”
“Your mother’s alive?” Irina asked once she’d tucked the boy back in.
Easier to say no than to explain it all.
She told him she was sorry, and moments later asked what he did for a living.
“You first.”
“Here in the promised land? A three-star career. Mondays through Fridays I waitress at a Salvadoran restaurant on Broadway for minimum wage plus tips—tips from people little better off than myself. Three nights a week I do maid service for homes and apartments in Brentwood. Weekends I sweep and vacuum office buildings. Your turn.”
“I’m in the movies.”
“Sure you are.”
“I’m a driver.”
“Like for limos, right?”
“A stunt driver.”
“You mean all those car chases and stuff?”
“That’s me.”
“Wow. You must get paid good for that.”
“Not really. But it’s steady work.”
Driver told her how Shannon had taken him under wing, taught him what he needed to know, got him his first jobs.
“You’re lucky to have someone like that in your life. I never did.”
“What about Benicio’s father?”
“We were married for about ten minutes. His name is Standard Guzman. First time I met him I asked, ‘Well, is there a deluxe Guzman somewhere around?’ and he just looked at me, didn’t get it at all.”
“What’s he do?”
“Lately he’s been into charity work, helping provide jobs for state workers.”
Driver was lost. Seeing his expression, she added: “He’s inside.”
“Prison, you mean?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“How long?”
“Be out next month.”
On TV, beneath the looming, half-exposed breasts of his blonde assistant, a stubby dark guy in a silver lamé frock coat performed parlor magic. Balls between upturned cups appeared and vanished, cards leapt from the deck, doves flapped up from chafing pans.
“He’s a thief—a professional, he keeps telling me. Started off burglarizing homes when he was fourteen, fifteen, moved on from there. They got him taking down a savings and loan. Couple of local detectives happened to walk into the middle of it. They’d come to deposit their paychecks.”
Standard did indeed get out the following month. And despite all Irina’s protests that this would not happen, no way in godalmighty hell, he came home to roost. (What can I say? she said. He loves the boy. Where else is he gonna go?) She and Driver were hanging together a lot by then, which didn’t bother Standard at all. Most nights, long after Irina and Benicio had gone to bed, Driver and Standard would sit out in the front room watching TV. Lot of the good, old stuff you only caught then, late at night.
So once, along about one on a Tuesday night, Wednesday morning really, they’re sitting there watching a cop movie, Glass Ceiling, and a commercial comes on.
“Rina tells me you drive. For the movies?”
“Right.”
“Have to be pretty good.”
“I get by.”
“Not like a nine-to-five gig, huh?”
“One of the advantages.”
“You have anything on for tomorrow? Today now, I guess it is?”
“Nothing scheduled.”
Having found its way past a thicket of commercials for furniture dealers, bedding stores, cut-rate insurance, twenty-piece cooking sets and videocassettes of great moments in American history, the movie started up again.
“I’m thinking I can speak frankly with you,” Standard said.
Driver nodded.
“Rina trusts you, I figure I can too….You want another beer?”
“Usually.”
He went out to the kitchen and brought two back. Snapped the tab off one and handed it over.
“You know what I do, right?”
“More or less.”
Snapped the tab and took a swallow of his.
“Okay. So here’s the thing. I’ve got a job today, something that’s been on the burner a long time. But my driver’s been…well, detained.”
“Like this guy,” Driver said, nodding towards the TV, where a suspect was being interrogated. The front legs of the chair on which he sat had been cut down to make it as uncomfortable as possible.
“Good chance of it. What I’m wondering is, any chance you’d consider taking his place?”
“Driving?”
“Right. We go in early morning. It’s—”
Driver held up a hand.
“I don’t need to know, don’t want to know. I’ll drive for you. That’s all I’ll do.”
“Fair enough.”
Three or four more minutes of movie action, and commercials shouldered back in. Miracle stove-top grill. Commemorative plates. Greatest hits.
“I ever tell you how much Rina and Benicio depend on you?”
“I ever tell you what an asshole you are?”
“Nah,” Standard said. “But that’s okay, just about everybody else has.”
They both laughed.
That first run, Driver netted close to three thousand.
“Anything up?” he asked Jimmie, his agent, the next day.
“Couple of calls about to go out.”
“Cattle calls, you’re saying.”
“Okay.”
“And for this I pay you fifteen percent?”
“Welcome to the promised land.”
“Locusts and all.”
But by day’s end he had two jobs lined up. Word was getting around, Jimmie told him. Not just that he could drive, the town was full of people who could drive, but word that he’d be there when they needed him, never watched the clock, never made waves, always delivered. They know you’re a pro, not some hardass or punk out to make a name for himself, Jimmie said, you’re who they’re gonna ask for.
First shoot didn’t pick up till next week, so Driver decided to head up Tucson way for a visit. He hadn’t seen his mom since they pried her out of the chair long years past. He’d been little more than a kid then.
Why now? Hell if he knew.
As he drove, in a series of shudders the landscape changed about him. First the haphazard, old-town streets of central L.A. slowly giving way to the city’s ever-incomprehensible network of ancillary cities and suburbs, then nothing much but interstate for a long time. Gas stations, Denny’s, Del Tacos, discount malls, lumber yards. Trees, walls and fences. By this time the Galaxie had been traded in on a vintage Chevy with a hood you could land aircraft on and a backseat big enough for a small family to live in.
He stopped for breakfast at a Union 76 and watched the truckers sitting in their special section over plates of steak and eggs, roast beef, meatloaf, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak. Great American road food. Truckers, the final embodiment of America’s enduring dream of absolute freedom, forever lighting out for the territory.
The building into whose parking lot he nosed the Chevy looked and smelled like the auxiliary buildings in which Sunday-School sessions had been held when he was a kid. Cheapest possible construction, dull white walls, unadorned cement floors.
“You’re here to see…?”
“Sandra Daley.”
The receptionist peered deeply into her screen. Fingers danced nimbly on a worn keyboard.
“I can’t seem to—oh, here she is. You are…?”
“Her son.”
She picked up her phone.
“Could you have a seat over there, sir? Someone will be with you shortly.”
Within minutes a young Eurasian woman wearing a starched white lab coat, jeans beneath, came through locked doors. Low wooden heels ticked on the concrete floors.
“You’re here to see Mrs. Daley?”
Driver nodded.
“And you’re her son?”
He nodded again.
“I’m sorry. Do please forgive our caution. But records show that, all these years, Mrs. Daley has never had a visitor. Could I ask to see some ID?”
Driver displayed his driver’s license. Those days he still had one that wasn’t a double or triple blind.
Almond eyes scanned it.
“Again,” she said, “I apologize.”
“Not a problem.”
Above almond eyes her eyebrows were natural, straight across with almost no arch, a bit unkempt. He always wondered why Latinas plucked theirs only to draw in thin arched substitutes. Change yourself, you change the world?
“I regret having to tell you this: your mother died last week. There were a number of other problems, but congestive heart failure is what finally took her. An alert nurse picked up the clinical change; within the hour we had her on a ventilator. But by then it was too late. It so often is.”
She touched his shoulder.
“I’m sorry. We did our best to get in touch. Apparently what contact numbers we had were long since invalid.” Her eyes swept his face, looking for cues. “Nothing I can say will be of much help, I’m afraid.”
“It’s okay, Doctor.”
Brought up on tonal languages, she caught the slight rise in pitch at sentence’s end. He hadn’t even known it was there.
“Park,” she said. “Doctor Park. Amy.”
They both turned to watch as a gurney came into view down the corridor. Barge on the river. African Queen. A nurse sat astride the patient, pumping at his chest. “Shit!” she said. “Just felt a rib crack.”
“I barely knew her. I just thought….”
“I really must go.”
In the parking lot he leaned against the Chevy, stood looking off towards the mountain ranges ringing Tucson. Catalinas to the north, Santa Rita to the south, Rincon east, Tucson west. The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?
