THE VOICE SAYS, “THERE’S a real scientific reason for this. The reason that you so often see dogs in older photographs with pipes and cigars and cigarettes in their mouth is because photographers found that they were extremely sensitive to nicotine, the dogs were.”
The radio host says, “Sensitive? As in, they responded to it as they might have to a drug?”
“What a load of crap,” criticizes Teko.
The Lincoln pulls up beside a newspaper vending machine, and Yolanda, who has been sprawled across the seat to avoid stepping on Ray Fraley, emerges to buy a copy of the Los Angeles Times. The fugitives are looking to buy a car.
“Yes. Exactly. Photographers found that it was extremely helpful in terms of getting the dog to stand still and in place during the somewhat lengthy process of exposing the plate. So it became a common thing.”
“And there was no comic intent? No sense of here, just for laughs let’s dress this dog in a top hat with a cigar?”
“So why,” says Teko, “didn’t they just mix some tobacco in with their food?”
Yolanda runs her finger down the column. BUICK ’69 EL’TRA; CHRYSLER, ’68—NEWPORT; FORD GALAXIE 500 ’69; PONTIAC CATALINA ’62.
“Too big,” says Teko. “Too much money. Check the foreign cars.”
“And yet frequently,” says the interviewer, “you do see these animals wearing human clothes in photographs of the time.”
“Yes, but there was no true scientific reason behind it, as with the tobacco items.”
DATSUN ’72; TOYOTA, ’71, CORONA; VOLKSWAGEN ’68 BUG.
Teko: “Anyways, how would they get enough nicotine to actually be, like, drugged, just from having an unlit cigar in their mouth?” No one answers him. “What a load of crap,” he concludes.
“Now we’ll be accepting some questions from our listeners at home.”
Teko stops again. Yolanda takes a handful of dimes and goes to make some calls from a pay phone. The three occupants of the car sit without speaking.
“Hello? My young cat is very active and seems to want to be played with, but the thing is whenever I try to invent a game for her, she just stalks away. What’s wrong?”
Yolanda makes a thumbs-up as she walks back from the pay phone. Leaning in the driver’s side window, she points to a circled ad for a ’63 Corvair offered for three hundred dollars. She then points to an address written in the upper margin of the page. All this silent business is so that Ray Fraley has no way of identifying the make and model car they buy. Teko nods.
“Am I on?” asks a man. “What I wanted to say is it seems to me that everyone knows about dogs, but nobody knows about horses. What I mean is that practically everybody can tell the difference between a poodle and a bulldog, but nobody knows the difference between, say, a quarter horse and an Arabian. Why?”
“I honestly don’t know, but I certainly agree with you. And the strange thing is that horses are such a big thing, quote unquote, today.”
1466 East Fifty-fourth Street
Jimmy Reddy knew Lillian Maybry liked her greens, so he picked some fresh that morning before the sun got too hot to be standing around like a old fool and made up a brown paper bag for her. He carried it over. Hot already, with one of them warm winds that put a angry in you.
Lillian was a nice girl and easy to look at. Something funny, though. The house seemed to be full of guns and white folks.
“Where’s Lillian at?” he asked a young white man who sat in the front room. The white man shrugged, so he carried his bag into the kitchen and set it down. A fat white girl came up and upped herself on tiptoe to peep in the bag, nice as you please.
“Hi,” she said. “Did you just pick those? They look fantastic.”
“Got ’em out my garden,” he said.
“How do you make them?” she asked.
“You just, you boil ‘em, or you can fry ’em up in a little oil, you know, till they get wilty.” He sort of backed out of the kitchen. That girl was wearing a gun.
The old man found Lillian in her bedroom, fully dressed but looking kind of groggy on the edge of the bed.
“Brought you some collard greens,” he said.
“That’s nice,” said Lillian. “Thank you.”
“What’s going on around here?” he asked. “Sort of funny-looking.”
“Oh, hi.”
Jimmy looked toward the open door and saw the fat girl again with a hard-looking white girl, hard-looking. She had a gun too.
“Is Lillian feeling OK?” asked the fat girl.
“Ask her yourself,” said Jimmy. “I got to go.”
YOLANDA CLEARS HER THROAT.
“Yo deseo la compra el azul coche que usted coloca el anuncio en el Tiempo de Los Angeles.”
“No entiendo.” The small woman stands on her doorsill, arms folded.
“¿El coche usted desea venta?” Yolanda tries again.
“¿Mi car? ¿Usted quiere intentarlo? You drive it?”
“Um. No una cosa importante. Aqui dinero suficiente y la coloco en manos de usted.”
The woman shakes her head and reaches to close the door on her visitor. “No entiendo.”
Yolanda: “¡Puse el dinero a usted para el azul del coche!”
“OK. ¿Usted quiere pagarme y tomar mi car ahora? Right now?”
“Sí. Um, yo quiero pagarme y tomar el car. Coche.”
The woman shakes her head at the dual idiocy of this Anglo lady’s Spanish and her willingness to purchase the car sight unseen.
“Trescientos. Three hundred dollars.”
“Esto es dinero requerida.”
“¿Huh?”
“La suma requerida está aquí.”
“OK. OK.” The woman can’t help laughing now. She has the cash in her hands and holds it close to the bosom of her tired housedress, gathering it in as she laughs.
“Me deseo hago los papeles necesarios al gobierno. ¿Todo a la derecha?”
“No entiendo. No entiendo.” The woman laughs and laughs.
“Hago los papeles al gobierno. OK?”
She laughs: “Bueno, bueno. OK. No cuido.”
RAY FRALEY HAS AN IRA, which he pronounces like the male given name. Lest it be confused with the terrorist army, ha-ha. He has a certificate of deposit, and a mutual fund, and a savings passbook he wants to bring in to have the interest registered. He has term life insurance through his company and whole life through Irving Kreitzberg, CLU over in West Hollywood. He has a death, disability, and dismemberment policy, which pays incrementally greater amounts for the loss of a single finger, a hand, an entire arm, and so on, and does he really want to think about this now? He has Blue Cross, which provides for a semiprivate hospital room. He has a house that last belonged to Ted Bessell. From That Girl. Or was it Dick Sargent? Dick York? It was a colorless male lead. He sees the face and hears the laugh track smothering the unfunny lines. Bob Crane? Bob Cummings, ring a bell? Bob Montgomery? That would be Elizabeth’s dad. She starred with Dick York—or was it Sargent?—in that show. But whoever it was who’d walked the halls of his house, burned meat in the barbecue pit, and pissed in the toilets, he just can’t remember at this particular moment. Anyway, these are the assets he has counted on being able to marshal against the onslaught of the world. They had looked formidable, solid, marking him as a propertied man, a man of means, of a certain impermeability. And now?
Bob Cummings had been Robert in the movies. Ray Fraley had watched his movies at the Fox, in Detroit, when he was a boy. Not a pot to piss in then. If he’d had a way then to articulate his desires, they would have come out: IRA, life insurance, mortgage, etc. It is these financial instruments that give form to his dreams. His dreams wrap themselves in their legal names.
Impermeabile means raincoat in Italian. Ducking into Renascente on a rainy February day, “Vorrei un impermeabile.” Feeling like Gregory Peck, picturing himself in the future, telling the anecdote of this needful Roman purchase, the rain angling out of a slate sky onto the very history of
Western civilization.
But it wasn’t Robert Cummings stalking those drafty halls he now owned. Bob Cummings hadn’t sat on his patio or poured an old-fashioned at his wet bar. Who?
And what else? He has a very exciting oral-genital relationship with a married middle-aged secretary in his office named Maureen. He has a teenage daughter with a canopy bed. An ex-wife whose wedding he will attend because they are “good friends.” When he pictures her mentally, he sees a figure sitting propped up in bed, wearing sunglasses, a hundred-millimeter filter cigarette burning in an ashtray at her bedside right next to her sweating tumbler. That aggrieved noontide voice.
This car purrs just like a kitten.
1466 East Fifty-fourth Street
This is the talk of the neighborhood. Over the fence while you hanging the wash and whatnot: Y’all hear what’s up at Sheila’s? What they coming in all bold like that unless they wanting people to know. Because they don’t know how dull it can get around here. They are the number one topic, mmmmm-hmm. They gonna kill the cops. They gonna start a revolution. Revolution? What we need a revolution for? Just open a supermarket around here we don’t be going to Sam’s for every damn thing. Ha-ha-ha.
Meanwhile …
At 1220 hours Metro Squad Castle-Bravo Six on routine patrol did observe two unattended vehicles at location rear of One Four Five One East Fifty-third Street matching APB descriptions on vehicles sought in Eight Three Three West Eighty-fourth Street incident. Per bulletin, dispatch informed but no further action taken.
EN ROUTE TO GRIFFITH PARK, the suitably remote location where they plan to release Ray Fraley with a stern warning and switch to the Corvair, Yolanda, following in the new car, misses the exit. Tania, who drives the Lincoln, watches helplessly in the rearview as the little blue car continues on the freeway, heading toward beautiful downtown Burbank. That was stupid. Teko curses.
Once in the vast park, is she a little surprised to find herself on Crystal Springs Road? She’d graduated from Crystal Springs School for Girls, where she’d met and commenced the seduction of Eric Stump.
She sees it now as an act of bourgeois self-annihilation. I mean, wanting to be a housewife at age sixteen?
But anyway, Crystal Springs, the reservoir itself, had been a long streak of glittering mercury in the sun that slanted over the coastal ranges, another of the Bay Area’s limitless ornamentations, fenced off from the public and viewed mainly from the viaducts she drove her MG across.
Teko leans close. He whispers, “We have to waste this guy. Yolanda’s not showing up.”
Tania’s eyes fill with tears.
“We’ll leave his body in the bushes. Nobody’ll find it for days. Now, you knock it the fuck off. The last thing I need is any of your rich bitch bullshit. Just shut up and do as you’re ordered.”
“We could wait a little longer. Please. Just a little while longer.”
They wait. The radio reports again on the useless raid on Eighty-fourth Street. The garbage-strewn house has been found to be unoccupied. Teko sneers. Tania reaches out to change the station, slaps away Teko’s hand when he moves to restrain her. It is an unpremeditated, unprecedented act, and they stare at each other in silent hiatus before Tania turns the knob, seeking music.
In the back, Ray Fraley hears the famous voice singing the grinding dirge: “If I ever get out of here, thought of giving it all away.” He says to himself, Oh Yes God Please.
Whispering again: “Fucking have to off him. It’s him or us.”
“Just wait. She’ll come.”
“You do what I tell you, or I swear it’ll be both of you rotting in the bushes.”
Tania has basically made up her mind that she isn’t going to allow Ray Fraley to be killed just because Yolanda can’t read road signs, or follow big white cars, or whatever her problem is. She works to convince herself that this mutinous plan is worth it on the basis of what seems like the distant memory of Ray Fraley’s not-so-bad smile as he leaned out of his car window to talk to two apparent hitchhikers in the early morning. The bright, mildly lecherous smile of a man taking time out of his busy day.
“We wait five more minutes.”
“I’m not fucking bargaining with you, Tania.”
“Five minutes, then you can kill him.”
“The fuck? Quiet the hell down, will you?”
“Just not yet. Don’t kill him yet. OK?”
“Just, like, shh! Shhhhh! Come on.”
Tania finds it easier to talk to Teko like this when she’s alone with him. Together he and Yolanda just wear her down. But separately they’re both little nothings. In the old days she wouldn’t have given either of them the time of day. She is amazed at how easily that old sense of class privilege resurfaces. On the other hand, she’s a little proud of how well she’s adapted; this is the very first time in her life she has had to associate, for a sustained period, with people she hasn’t chosen.
“OK. OK. I’m ready to move on to plan B.” Teko is holding a revolver and gesturing with his head toward the huddled prisoner in the back. He nervously cocks and uncocks the weapon’s hammer, the barrel aimed carelessly at his own femoral artery.
“Are you sure you want to do it in the car? Pretty messy.”
“Well, I guess not. But where’m I supposed to?”
“I don’t know. It’s your plan.”
“Well, I can’t just shoot him in plain sight.”
“Well, we can’t just go driving around with a bloody body in the back.” Tania slackens her face to demonstrate the stupidity of this prospect.
“You’re shouting again.”
“I’m not. I’m not shouting. This is talking.”
“Well, whisper.”
“I’m so sick of whispering. I don’t have a whispering voice. Some people were born to go mousing around whispering their whole lives and I’m not one of them. I’m so sick of whispering I could scream.”
“Don’t scream.”
“I’m not screaming. I’m not shouting. I’m just sitting here talking. You’re the one who puts us in these situations where we have to be going around talking in these little like whispery voices. Talk about something else and we don’t have to whisper. Just, like, change the subject.”
“You’re crazy. You’ll never be an urban guerrilla. You just don’t understand that this sort of work calls for instantaneous reactions to rapidly unfolding developments.”
“OK. Sure. I don’t understand. Let’s just shoot the guy. Mr. Fraley, will you please sit up?”
“Stop! Shouting!” screams Teko. “Fraley, you just lie there, man! Don’t listen to her! She is fucking around with us.”
The blanket is trembling. Nearly twenty-four hours of trembling blankets. Something about this upholstered fear that makes it more palpable, more pitiable; something about it that marks the total destitution of these seized and interrupted lives. She is moved beyond words by these frightened people hidden away under blankets; she is furious that Teko sees them merely as markers at arc’s end of a gesture he is determined to complete.
Teko is red-faced, and he is shaking with anger. He raises the gun and presses it to her collarbone.
“You”—he taps the gun against her—“fucking”—tap—“watch it”—tap.
Then there is motion in blue heading up the road and through the parking lot. It’s the Corvair, with a harried-looking Yolanda behind the wheel. She pulls up beside the Lincoln, yanks the emergency brake.
“Sorry I’m so late,” she says.
1466 East Fifty-fourth Street
Everybody began falling by to see the SLA. Cinque sent Crystal out to get some Boone’s Farm, and Sheila watched uneasily as he slugged that down while describing the SLA’s goals, showing off his quick-draw technique with his Chief’s Special, and occasionally seeming to drop off to sleep in mid-sentence. The white man kept watch out the front windows. Charles Gates went up to Cinque and whispered something in his ear. Sheila rolled her eyes. Mr. Big Secret. Man so full of it he
can’t see straight. Cinque nodded, and Charles Gates left.
Charles Gates was booking on out of there with that easy five hundred. Never to return, baby.
Sheila went to stand behind Willie and look out her own front window, thank you. This was a day of wonders for sure: another white man, wearing a coat and tie, was outside talking to Charles Gates, pointing and gesturing at her house. He looked familiar, and then his friend or what you call colleague with the little camera comes up, and she sees the camera has on it “KNXT MiniCam Unit.”
She heard Cinque ask, “Where’s the station wagon?”
“I don’t know. When did you send that kid?” asked the hard-looking one.
“While ago, now.”
“With the money.”
“What you want me to do?”
“Bye-bye.”
“Well, what you want?”
Sheila was tireder than she could ever remember. Up all night and then this whole day being what her grandma would have called a tribulation. Cartons and boxes seemed to be piled in every corner of her home now, and she picked her way past, heading for her bedroom, where she found that white boy stretched out on her own bed. She put her hands on her hips. Not a word. Just one look was all it took. He leaped up as if she’d stuck him with a hatpin and was gone. She closed the door behind him.
When Timmy got home from school he didn’t see his mother but he did see all those white people and their guns were still there. The man told him to Sit Down and Shut Up and he went out the back. Mr. Reddy was out there and he told him to go to his grandma. “Go get your grandma,” said Mr. Reddy.
EVEN AFTER FIVE O’CLOCK, the main parking lot is jammed and a long line forms outside the gates of the happiest place on earth, Disneyland. Curled in exhaustion on the backseat of the Corvair, Tania senses a distant agitation, in the noise and aromas, in the quality of the light that falls upon this former citrus orchard. It is a place as peculiarly essential as can be. For millions it is an introduction to crowds and their logic. It is rules and order in carefree guise. It is a walk inside a giant rendering of the sugar coating that swathes American life, an exhibit like the Smithsonian’s enormous and anatomically precise organs. But who sees it that way? A million kids with stomachaches? Parents in ridiculous tourist garb, popping off flashcubes like confections of frosted light, the fathers encumbered with Nikons and Pentaxes, the mothers easily swinging Instamatics from their wrist straps? These people waiting to buy sugar water, spun sugar, sugar baked in the familiar forms of nutritious items? Those who stand in line to sit in moving chairs? It is the greatest fun of all, to ennoble all of a culture’s half-forsaken myths and shibboleths by reducing them to cliché and sanitizing them. Yet even among clichés there are those that aren’t permitted here, they’re so ambiguously evocative or of such unpalatably grizzled mien. Everything here looks as clean and disposable as a Dixie cup.
Trance Page 9
