Jane Carver of Waar

nathan long

night shade books

san francisco

Jane Carver of Waar
© 2012 by Nathan Long

This edition of
Jane Carver of Waar

© 2012 by Night Shade Books

Cover Illustration by Dave Dorman

Cover design by Rebecca Silvers

Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

All rights reserved

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-59780-396-0

eISBN: 978-1-59780-409-7

Night Shade Books

http://www.nightshadebooks.com

For my mom and dad,
who never stopped believing in me.

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

Years ago I used to go with my friend Anthony Balsley to see this Irish punk band called The Troubles at a bar on Fairfax known as Molly Malone’s. Anthony was a burly, Harley-riding tough guy with a pompadour and a broken nose. We shared a love for rock-a-billy, punk, ska, and all things rowdy and loud.

One night as I was walking toward Molly’s green door, I saw Anthony at the curb comparing Harleys with a big, red-headed biker chick. Anthony is around five eleven, and this girl was a good three inches taller than him and as broad in the shoulder. He introduced her as Jane and me as Nathan, his Hollywood screenwriter pal, and she gave me a disinterested handshake. I didn’t blame her. Next to Anthony I looked as fascinating as a glass of lukewarm water.

Anyway, Jane came in with us and we spent the night singing and drinking along with the band and having a blast. At the end of the evening Jane went home with Anthony and I never saw her again: just another of Anthony’s one night stands. She passed completely out of my mind until last year when I got a strange package at my PO box. It was full of cheap cassettes, numbered one through fifteen, along with a nearly illegible note written on a piece of Motel 6 stationary. This is what it said.

I got yr address from Anthony. Maybe U can make a story out of this. If it makes any $ send half to PO Box ____, Coral Gables, Fla. Don’t try and cheat me about it either. If U do I’ll know and U don’t want that.

J. Carver

I groaned. The writer’s curse is to be constantly approached by well-meaning idiots who say, “Hey man, you’re a writer. I got a great idea for a story. You write it and we’ll split the money,” not realizing that having ideas is less than one percent of the work in writing.

I put off listening to the cassettes for months, but one night the cable was on the fritz and I was feeling too lazy to read a book, so I popped the first tape into an old boom box I’ve had lying around since the ’80s. I didn’t stop listening until I’d finished the last tape at eleven the next morning. Yes, Jane, I thought, I might be able to make some “$” from this.

At first I was tempted to do a total rewrite: tell it in a more traditional style, but every time I tried, it lost the original punch of Jane’s voice and died. In the end I let it stand, doing little more than excising the “ah”s and “um”s and the occasional mispronounced word. I left her colorful and sometimes non-grammatical prose the way I found it. I
did
rearrange a bit. I’ve spared you most of the “No, wait, I forgot, before that we were already...” stuff and put it all in chronological order.

Jane is remarkably honest in her admissions of her failings, but sometimes I wonder if she isn’t being too modest. She says throughout the tapes how ugly she is. Well, I met her, and though she was no Scarlett Johansson, she was by no means ugly. She had the kind of broad-faced, rugged good looks you associate with frontierswomen and female fire-fighters.

Other than that, the document is what it is. If you choose to think of it as a work of fiction, I’m sure my publishers won’t mind. If you take it as fact, well then, maybe you too will find a cave in the hills one day and have an amazing adventure.

And if you do, send me a tape.

Nathan Long

Hollywood, CA

March 2011

PS. No, her name isn’t really Jane Carver, so don’t go digging in the Coral Gables phone book.

CHAPTER ONE

HUNTED!

I
’d just killed a man in Panorama City and the cops were on my trail.

No wait. Let me go back a bit. I’d been having a drink at the Fly By Nightclub, this biker joint just the Panorama City-side of the 405 from Van Nuys airport. Panorama City is nothing but ten square blocks of North Valley strip-mall hell, but I liked the Fly By Night: Merle Haggard and AC/DC on the jukebox, a guy named Mike behind the bar, a couple of pool tables, and signs on the bathroom doors that said Pointers and Setters. Homey, relaxing.

At least it was until this damn fool started trying to get into my jeans. You can’t hate a guy for asking, not the way I look, and sometimes, some days, with the right guy, with the right line of bullshit, I can be mighty obliging. Hell, I’ll even help him with the buttons. But this was the wrong guy, on the wrong day, with entirely the wrong line of bullshit. So I told him, politely, but with a look in my eye that a sober man should have read, no thank you. Well, he didn’t listen, and
that
you can hate a man for.

He kept piling it on. “Come on, sweetcheeks, who you kiddin’? When you had better’n me? I’ll take you outta this world.”

“Brother, I said no.”

“Damnit girl, you got enough ass for every man in this bar with some left over for seconds. You can’t spare ol’ Dutch a piece?”

I don’t mind telling you my teeth were beginning to set a little on edge. But this being California and the Three Strikes law being in effect, and me having two strikes and a foul tip against me, I put my hands in my pockets and tried to dodge him for the rest of the night.

Some things you just can’t dodge. A little later I went out to the parking lot for a smoke, since you can’t smoke inside in California anymore, not even in a biker bar. The fool followed me out. There I was, sitting on my fat-boy, Baby, smoking what I didn’t know was going to be the last Marlboro of my life, when Digby the Idiot Boy comes up behind me, slides his hand down the back of my jeans, and squeezes my ass.

Now you can say all you want to me. Sticks and stones and all that, but no man, or woman for that matter, puts hands on me without an invitation. It’s not a code or a creed or something I even think about. It just sets me off, and when I get my mad-on the world turns red and hot and Jane isn’t driving the bus anymore. I punched him once. Once.

I swear I was aiming for his face. He just jumped or something. I caught him in the throat instead, a picture perfect kill strike just like they taught me in Airborne Ranger training. It worked. I heard something crack and red spit sprayed out of his mouth. He hit the ground like a pair of empty jeans.

“Fuck.” I knelt beside him, shook him. “Hey, buddy. Hey Dutch.” I checked his pulse, but I knew he was dead. You see it once, it stays with you.

I’m just too fucking big for this world. Any other girl would have hit that guy and maybe bruised his neck a little, or if she was lucky, and really connected, she might have sent him to the hospital. Me, I killed him. A murder rap. My life was over. And just when I was getting things back together.

Somebody was shouting. I looked up. In the parking lot of the 7-Eleven a street guy with a squeegee and a bottle of Windex was pointing at me. “Hey, bitch! Hey! Leave him be! I saw you! You robbin’ him now too?”

Behind him some rich kids standing next to their SUV were staring at me. The girl was tugging on the guy, trying to pull him into the truck, but he waved her off, dialing his cell-phone, all jittery. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m calling the cops.”

People on the street were turning. A couple of guys stepped out of the bar, coming toward me. It just wasn’t going to look like self defense. Not with the dead guy unarmed and me with my record. I fired up Baby and rode.

***

The cops got the dragnet on me before I made fifteen blocks. Gum-ball lights were flashing down every street I turned on. Pretty quick they had me hemmed in south of Ventura Boulevard, chasing my tail in the twisty suburban hills of Tarzana.

They almost caught me near Winnetka and Wells. I was burning down a side street when a prowler with his lights off roared out of an alley, right on my tail pipe. He was trying to nudge me, which the cops ain’t supposed to do with bikes, but hey, bikers ain’t citizens, right? Two more black and whites cut off the street ahead of me.

I was boxed in but good. There was only one chance. I laid Baby over so flat I shredded my left knee—denim and skin—and fishtailed into a driveway, missing a parked car by a gnat’s ass. I almost ditched when Baby’s back wheel slipped on the front lawn, but I muscled him back under control and gunned it along the side of the house. I heard crunching metal behind me. Guess the cop didn’t have a gnat’s ass to spare.

I barreled into a back yard, ducked a clothesline and swerved to miss a swingset, then rode down a flimsy, white picket fence. I hit an alley and lit out again.

I kept taking the up-turns, hoping to find some little rabbit-run that would take me over the mountains and down onto Highway One where I’d hitch a ride to Mexico and points south. What I found was a dead end, way at the top of Vanalden. Before I had time to turn around and find a better street, I heard the sirens coming up the hill behind me.

I ditched Baby in some yuppie’s kidney-shaped pool. It was a tearful goodbye. I kissed him on the gas cap and lowered him into the deep end without a splash. That bike had taken me back and forth across this country more times than I could remember and had been more faithful than any lover or friend had ever been, even Big Don. Don had died on me, the fucker.

I ran into the scrub and dirt of the Topanga mountains.

With a little luck I might have made it. If a swamp-trash country girl like me couldn’t elude LA flatfoots in the biggest chunk of wild land inside the city, I’d give up all my merit badges. Unfortunately, I don’t have any luck. Never have. They brought dogs. And helicopters.

I nearly pissed myself. Too many episodes of
COPS
I guess. You know it’s over when they bring the choppers. Two big whirly-birds came up from the valley and started cutting a huge grid pattern over my head. Their searchlights criss-crossed the scrubby hills, turning ’em white as sugar. It looked like the lights at a big Hollywood premier, only upside down. I didn’t want to be the star of this premier.

I ran, splashing through streams so the dogs would lose me, keeping under trees so the choppers wouldn’t see me, but pretty soon those years of Marlboros caught up with me and my lungs felt like some midget with a chainsaw was trying to cut his way out of my chest. The choppers were way off and I couldn’t hear the dogs so I ducked into a thick clump of bushes to catch my breath.

Funny, as soon as I stopped, that dead guy caught up to me. I guess I’d been running so fast my brain had lagged behind like a trailer hitched to a car with a piece of rope. Now that I slowed down that trailer slammed into my brain.

I’d killed a guy! I shook like I had a fever, like his corpse had just wrapped its cold, dead arms around me. That poor slob didn’t have his life anymore because of me. Sure I owed him a punch in the mouth for what he did, but he didn’t deserve to die.

I started to choke up. Then I got mad. How could I feel sorry for some dumb, drunk, grab-ass son-of-a-bitch? Fuck him. Fuck him for not ducking. Fuck him for dying so easy. And most of all, fuck him for
ruining my life!

Shit, I was going to cry after all.

Barking bounced off the rocks. The dogs had my scent again. I peeked out. Flashlights were swinging through the trees about twenty yards away. The choppers were turning my way. I guess I could have just stayed where I was and waited for the dogs to find me. I mean, what was I running to anyway? But giving up never occurred to me. Just the
idea
of being cooped up in prison for the rest of my life made my chest tighten up. I’d done juvie time and county time, but hard time? I’d never survive. I’d rather die right here, swinging and shouting, than be trapped inside four walls for forty years.