Authors: James Sallis
Drive (5 page)
Second and third runs with Irina’s husband went well. Driver’s gym bag on the closet floor under shoes and dirty clothes fattened.
Then the next run.
Everything started out fine. Ducks in a row, all on track, according to plan. Target was a low-end, homegrown shop offering check cashing and payroll advances. It hunkered down at one spare end of a Sixties strip mall, next to an abandoned theater with posters for dubbed science fiction movies and foreign-made crime thrillers featuring out-of-work American actors still under glass. To the other side sat a pawn shop so erratically open it didn’t even bother to post business hours. Its real business took place through the back door. Garlic, cumin, coriander and lemon from a falafel shop aromatized the region.
They’d gone in at nine, first opening. Metal shutters got pushed up then, doors unlocked. Only hired help about, workers getting minimum wage with no incentive to hold out or really give much of a shit, boss never around till ten or after. That time of day, even if there was an alarm, you could count on police being tapped out by rush-hour traffic.
Unfortunately, cops had the pawn shop staked out and one of them, terminally bored, happened to be looking at Check-R-Cash when Standard’s crew went in. He had a thing for the tall Latina who manned the front desk.
“Well, shit.”
“Wha’s wrong, she don’ love you no more?”
He told them. “So what do we do?” Not even close to what they’d been waiting for.
DeNoux being senior officer, it was his decision. He ran a hand through bristle-cut gray hair. “You guys as tired of this detail as I am?” he asked.
Tired of eating crap? Getting broiled all day in the van? Peeing in bottles? What’s to be tired of?
“I hear you. What the fuck. Let’s hit it.”
Driver watched as the commandos burst out the van’s back doors and charged Check-R-Cash. Knowing their attention was directed forward, he eased out from behind the Dumpster. Took him but moments out of the car, motor running, to slash the van’s tires. Then he pulled up at the front of the store. Gunfire inside. Three had gone in. Two emerged to slam into the back seat as he popped the clutch, floored it, and shot out across the parking lot. One of the two who’d come out was mortally wounded.
Neither of them was Standard.
“You’ve had the pork and yucca, right?”
“Only about twenty times. Nice vest! New?”
“Everyone’s a comic.”
Even this early, a little before six, Gustavo’s was packed. Manny squinted as Anselmo slipped a Modelo before him. Any time he left his cave the light was too strong.
“Gracias.”
“How’s the writing gig?”
“Hey, we’re the same. Sit on our butts all day guiding things towards disaster. Car or script goes over the edge, we start again.” He threw back his beer in a couple of gulps. “Enough of that shit. Let’s have something good.” Pulling a bottle out of his backpack. “New, from Argentina. Malbec grapes.”
Anselmo materialized with wineglasses. Manny poured, slid a glass across. They both sipped.
“Am I right?” He had another taste. “Oh, yeah. I’m right.” Holding onto the glass as onto a buoy, Manny looked about. “You ever think this was what your life would come to? Not that I know fuckall about your life.”
“Not sure I ever thought much about it.”
Manny held up his wineglass, peering across the liquid’s dark surface, tilting the glass as though to bring the world to level.
“I was going to be the next great American writer. No doubt in my mind whatever. Had a shitload of stories in literary magazines. Then my first novel came out and gave credence to the Flat Earth folk—fell right off the edge of the world. Second one didn’t even have energy enough left to scream as it went over. What about you?”
“Mostly I was just trying to get from Monday to Wednesday. Get out of my attic room, get out from under, get out of town.”
“That’s a lot of getting.”
“That’s ordinary life.”
“I hate ordinary life.”
“You hate everything.”
“I take exception, sir. A gross misrepresentation. While it may be true that I possess a distaste for such offal as the American political system, Hollywood movies, New York publishing, our last half-dozen Presidents, every movie made in the last ten years excepting those of the Coen Brothers, newspapers, talk radio, American cars, the music industry, media hype, the latest hot thing—”
“Quite a catalog.”
“—for many things in life I’ve an appreciation approaching reverence. This bottle of wine, for instance. The weather in L.A. Or the food to follow.” He refilled their glasses. “You still getting steady work?”
“Mostly.”
“Good. Not a total loss, then, moviemaking. Unlike many of today’s parents, at least it provides for its own.”
“Some of them.”
True to form, the food was everything remembered and anticipated. They followed up at a nearby bar, beer for Driver, brandy for Manny. An old man who spoke little English wandered in with his battered accordion and sat playing tangos and the songs of his youth, songs of romance and of war, as patrons stood him drinks and dropped bills into his instrument case and tears ran down his cheeks.
By nine Manny’s speech was slurring.
“So much for my big night out on the town. Used to be able to do this all night long.”
“I can drive you home.”
“Of course you can.”
“Let me just put this out there,” Manny said as they pulled up on the street outside his bungalow. “I have to be in New York next week. And I don’t fly.”
“Fly? You barely crawl.”
So maybe Driver was feeling the drinks too.
“Be that as it may,” Manny went on, “I was wondering if you’d consider driving me. I’d pay top dollar.”
“Don’t see how I can. I’ve got shoots scheduled. But even if I could, no way I’d ever take your money.”
Having wrestled his way out of the car, Manny leaned back down to the window: “Just keep it in mind, okay?”
“Sure I will. Why not? Get some sleep, my friend.”
Ten blocks away, a police unit hove up in his rear view mirror. Careful to maintain speed and to signal turns well in advance, Driver pulled into a Denny’s and parked facing the street.
The cop went by. He was patrolling solo. Window rolled down, takeout cup of coffee from 7-Eleven in one hand, radio crackling.
Coffee sounded good.
Might as well have some while he was here.
From inside he heard the bleating of a terminally wounded saxophone. Doc had ideas about music different from most people’s.
“Been a while,” Driver said when the door opened to a nose like a bloated mushroom, soft-poached eyes.
“Seems like just yesterday,” Doc said. “Course, to me everything seems like just yesterday. When I remember it at all.”
Then he just stood there. The sax went on bleating behind him. He glanced back that way, and for a moment Driver thought he might be getting ready to yell over his shoulder for it to shut up.
“No one plays like that anymore,” Doc said with a sigh.
He looked down.
“You’re dripping on my welcome mat.”
“You don’t have a welcome mat.”
“No—but I used to. A nice one. Then people somehow started getting the notion I meant it.” That strangled sound—a laugh? “You could be the blood man, you know. Like the milk man. Making deliveries. People’d put out bottles with a list of what they need rolled up in the mouth. Half a pint of serum, two pints of whole, small container of packed cells….I don’t need any blood, blood man.”
“But I will, and a lot more besides, if you don’t let me in.”
Doc backed off, gap in the door widening. Man had been living in a garage when he and Driver first met. Here he was, still living in a garage. Bigger one, though; Driver’d give him that. Doc had spent half a lifetime dispensing marginally legal drugs to the Hollywood crowd before he got shut down and moved to Arizona. Had a mansion up in the Hills, people said, so many rooms that no one, even Doc himself, ever knew who was living there. Guests wandered up stairwells during parties and didn’t show up again for days.
“Have a taste?” Doc asked, pouring from a half-gallon jug of generic bourbon.
“Why not?”
Doc handed him a half-filled water tumbler so bleary it might have been smeared with Vaseline.
“Cheers,” Driver said.
“That arm doesn’t look so good.”
“You think?”
“You want, I could have a look at it.”
“I didn’t call ahead.”
“I’ll work you in.”
Driver watched as dissembling fell away.
“Be good to be of use again.”
Doc scurried about gathering things. Some of the things he gathered and laid out in a perfect line were a little scary.
Easing Driver out of his coat, scissoring blood-soaked shirt and pasty T-shirt away, Doc whistled tunelessly, squinting.
“Eyesight’s not what it used to be.” As he reached to probe at the wound with a hemostat, his hand shook. “But then again, what is?”
He smiled.
“Takes me right back. All those muscle groups. Used to read Gray’s Anatomy obsessively when I was in high school. Lugged the damn thing around like a Bible.”
“Following in your father’s footsteps?”
“Not hardly. My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole. Spent his life selling roomfuls of furniture on credit to families he knew couldn’t afford it only so he could repossess it and go on charging them.”
Pulling the top off a bottle of Betadine, Doc dumped it into a saucepan, found a packet of cotton squares and threw them in as well. Fished one out with two fingers.
“Mother was Peruvian. How the hell they ever met’s beyond me, circles he traveled in. Back home she’d been a midwife and curandera. A healer. Important person in the community. Here, she got turned into goddam Donna Reed.”
“By him?”
“Him. Society. America. Her own expectations. Who can say?”
Doc swabbed gently at the wound.
His hands had quit shaking.
“Medicine was the great love of my life, the only woman I ever needed or went after….Been a while, though—like you say. Sure hope I remember the how of it.”
Yellowing teeth broke into a grin.
“Relax,” he said. He swiveled a cheap desk lamp closer. “Just having my fun with you.”
The bulb in the desk lamp flickered, failed, came back when Doc thumped it.
Taking a healthy swig himself, he handed Driver the jug of bourbon.
“Think that record’s got a skip in it?” Doc said. “Sounds to me like it’s been going round and round for some time.”
Driver listened. How could you tell? Same phrase over and over. Kind of.
Doc nodded to the jug.
“Take a few more hits off that, boy. Chances are you’ll need them. Probably both of us will, before this is over. You ready?”
No.
“Yes.”
As always, the set-up took most of the time. Spend five hours on the prep, then you drive it in a minute and a half flat. Driver got paid the same for that five hours as he did for the minute and a half. If it was a high-end shoot, he’d been in the day before to check out the car and test-drive it. Budget variety, he’d do that first thing the day of the shoot, while the rest of the staff scrambled about like ants, getting in line. Then he’d spend his time hanging out with writers, script people and bit players, taking advantage of the buffet table. Even on a “wee small” film (as Shannon described them) there’d be enough food to feed a midsize town. Cold cuts, various cheeses, fruit, pizza, canapés, bite-size hot dogs in barbecue sauce, doughnuts and sweet rolls and Danish, sandwiches, boiled eggs, chips, salsa, onion dip, granola, juices and bottled water, coffee, tea, milk, energy drinks, cookies, cakes.
Today he was driving an Impala and the sequence was: double-vehicle ram, bootlegger’s turn, moonshiner’s turn, sideswipe. Ordinarily they’d break it down to segments, but the director wanted to try for a straight shoot in real time.
Driver was on the run. Coming over a hill he’d see a blockade, two State Police cars pulled in nose to nose.
What you do is start off from almost a full stop, car in low gear. You come in from the right, a quarter of a car-width or so—just like finding the pocket by the headpin for a strike. Gas to the floor, you’re going between fifteen and thirty mph when you hit.
And it worked like a charm. The two State Police cars sprang apart, the Impala shot through with a satisfying fishtail and squeal of tires as Driver regained traction and floored it.
But it wasn’t over. A third cop car lugged down the hill. Seeing what happened, he’d jumped the road up there and now came sliding and crashing down through trees, throwing up divots of soil and vegetation, bottoming out more than once, hitting the road fifty yards behind.
Driver let off the gas, dropping to twenty-five, maybe thirty mph, then hauled the steering wheel just over a quarter-turn. At the very same moment he hit the emergency brake and engaged the clutch.
The Impala spun.
Ninety degrees into the spin, he released the brake, straightened the wheel and hit the gas, let the clutch out.
Now he faced back towards the oncoming car.
Accelerating to thirty, as he came abreast—cop’s head swiveling to follow, incredulous—he hauled the wheel to the left hard and fast. Dropped into low, hit the gas, righted the wheel.
Now he was behind his pursuer.
Driver resumed speed and, clocking exactly twenty mph over, struck the cop car scant inches to the right of the left tail light. The car went skidding out of control, nose gone from north to northeast when wheels came back online and took the car the way it was headed—off the road.
To everyone’s surprise, the stunt went down without a hitch, first take. The director shouted Yes! when the two of them climbed out of their cars. Scattered applause from cameramen, onlookers, gofers, set-up men, hangers-on.
“Righteous work out there,” Driver said.
He’d driven with this guy once or twice before. Patrick something. Round Irish moonface, harelip poorly repaired, shock of unruly straw-colored hair. Belying the ethnic stereotype, a man of few words.
“Yourself,” he said.
999
Dinner that night at a restaurant out in Culver City, place packed to bursting with ponderous Mission furniture, plaster shields and tin swords on the wall, red carpeting, a front door like something you’d see on movie castles. Everything new and made up to look old. Wooden tables and chairs distressed, ceiling beams etched with acid, concrete floor ground down by polishers, cracks laid in. Thing is, the food was great. You’d swear two or three generations of women were back in the kitchen slapping out tortillas by hand, squatting by fires to roast peppers and chicken.
For all he knew, maybe they were. Sometimes he worried about that.
Driver had a few drinks in the bar first. Everything there shamelessly new, stainless steel, polished wood, as though to refute what lay outside the bat-wing doors. Halfway into his first beer he found himself in a political discussion with the man sitting next to him.
Knowing nothing of current affairs, Driver made it up as he went along. Apparently the country was about to go to war. Words such as freedom, liberation and democracy surfaced repeatedly in his companion’s patter, causing Driver to remember ads for Thanksgiving turkeys, how simple it’s become: just stick them in the oven and these little flags pop up to let you know they were done.
Causing Driver also to remember a man from his youth.
Every day Sammy drove his mule cart through the neighborhood crying out Goods for sale! Goods for sale! His cart was piled high with things no one had need of, things no one wanted. Chairs with three legs, threadbare clothing, lava lamps, fondue sets and fishbowls, National Geographics. Day after day, year after year, Sammy went on. Why and how, no one knew.
“Can I cut in?”
Driver looked to his left.
“Double vodka, straight up,” Standard told the barkeep. He took his drink to a table near the back, beckoning Driver to follow.
“Haven’t seen you around much lately.”
Driver shrugged. “Working.”
“Any chance you’d be available tomorrow?”
“Could be.”
“I’ve got something lined up. One of those check-cashing places. Way off the beaten path—off any path. Nothing around at all. Gets its bankroll for the week—and for the weekend—tomorrow before opening.”
“And you know this how?”
“Let’s just say, someone I met. Someone lonely. Way it looks, we’re in and out in five, six minutes tops. Half an hour later you’re sitting over a lunch of prime rib.”
“Okay,” Driver said.
“You have a vehicle?”
“I will have. The night’s still young.” On one hand, he didn’t like so short a lead. On the other, he’d had his eye on a Buick LeSabre in the next apartment complex. Didn’t look like much, but the engine sang.
“Done, then.” They set a meet time and rendezvous point. “Buy you dinner?”
“I’m easy.”
Both of them had steaks smothered in a slurry of onion, peppers and tomato, sides of black beans, pimento-studded rice, flour tortillas. Beer or two with dinner, then back to the bar after. TV’d been turned on but blessedly you couldn’t hear it. Some brainless comedy where actors with perfect white teeth spoke their lines then froze in place to let the laugh track unwind.
Driver and Standard sat quietly together, proud men who would forever keep their own counsel. No need, use or call for banter between them.
“Rina thinks the world of you,” Standard said after ordering a final round. “And Benicio loves you. You know that, right?”
“Both sentiments are fully returned.”
“Any other man got that close to my woman, I’d have cut his throat long ago.”
“She’s not your woman.”
Drinks arrived. Standard paid, adding an oversize tip. Connections everywhere, Driver thought. He identifies with these servers, knows the map of their world. A certain tenderness.
“Rina’s always claimed that I expect too little from life,” Standard said.
“Then at least you’ll never be disappointed.”
“There is that.”
Clicking glasses with Driver, he drank, pulling lips back against teeth at the stringent burn of it.
“But she’s right. How can I expect more than what I see here in front of me? How can any of us?” He finished his drink. “Guess we oughta be going. Get our beauty rest. Busy day tomorrow and all that.”
Outside, Standard glanced up at the full moon, looked across at couples hanging out by cars, at four or five kids in gangsta finery—low-slung pants, oversize tops, head wraps—on the corner.
“Say something happened to me…” he said.
“Say it did.”
“Think you might see your way clear to taking care of Irina and Benicio?”
“Yeah…Yeah, I’d do that.”
“Good.” They’d reached their cars by then. Uncharacteristically, Standard held out a hand. “See you tomorrow, my friend. Take care.”
They shook.
Bouncy accordion on the Mexican station as Driver fired up his car. Back to the current apartment. Never thought of any of them as home really, however long he stayed in them. He cranked up the sound.
Happy music.
Before he could pull out, two firetrucks came screaming down the street, followed by an ancient sky-blue Chevy station wagon with five or six brown faces peering out from within, coop of chickens lashed to the top.
Life.
