by James Sallis
“We’d have to dig him up and ask. Second year, he went off the fourth-floor balcony.”
Driver heard ice rasping at the cup as the man swirled it and peered inside.
“Some people look at what happens to them and they think, there’s something responsible, some invisible agent behind all this, moving things around, causing things to happen.”
“Coherence,” Driver said.
“What?”
“Coherence. What they’re looking for.”
“I guess. Then others look at the same thing and see the purposelessness of it all. That there are only lame explanations, or none. No reason or reasons behind it. Things just happen. Life, death. Everything.”
Driver finished his coffee, stood looking around for the nearest trash receptacle. It was by the column where his visitor sat. He started that way.
“As I said, I don’t much care for being followed. I particularly don’t like having people close to me killed.”
The man smiled and said, “Lie down with dogs…” That was the last thing he said. As he tilted his head back, Driver swung around from the trash receptacle, fingers tucked, middle knuckle extended, and struck him in the throat. He felt the trachea give way and fold in on itself, watched surprise hit the man’s face, then his first gasps for air.
As the man slumped and looked about wildly, as he grasped for the table and slid down it, hands at last letting go just before he hit the floor, Driver walked away.
— • —
On impulse he swung out onto I-10 and tooled down past Tempe, through Ahwatukee and Casa Grande, to Tucson. Hour and twenty minutes with the new 75-mph speed limit, then you hit town and spent damn near as long inching down Speedway or Grant. Lots of empty buildings where small shops used to be, specialty clothing, hobbies and games, pool service centers, tax preparers. A row of five or six room-sized abandoned restaurants, home-cooking, Thai, Mexican, Lebanese, daily specials still painted on windows.
He pulled up in front of the old house. If they still lived here, they’d spent some of the money on fixing up the place. A new driveway, one without the edges that had crumbled away like old cornbread and the long cracks spilling over with green shoots and ant colonies. New wooden gate to the backyard and, back there, what looked to be a room added on. Dark reddish tiles on the roof.
Chances were good they’d moved on, of course. Maybe they weren’t even alive anymore. But then again, maybe they were still here. Tucson didn’t have the shifting-sands population of its neighbor to the northwest; here, people took root.
He thought of Mrs. Smith’s thinning hair, how she’d spend half an hour each morning brushing it out and spraying it with dollar-store hairspray to make it look fuller. He remembered the tiny stifling attic room that was his. How seldom Mr. Smith spoke and, when he did, how apologetically, as though embarrassed to be asking from the world what he knew to be fully unearned attention.
So here he sat, not in a classic Stingray this time but in an old Ford. He looked around at the stands of saguaro, rock-garden front lawns, the Catalina Mountains in the distance, and remembered thinking how there were these places in the world where nothing much ever changes, civilization’s tide pools. And after eight or nine years he still remembered every word of the note he’d left when he dropped off Nino’s money and Doc’s cat.
Her name is Miss Dickinson. I can’t say she belonged to a friend of mine who just died, since cats don’t belong to anyone, but the two of them walked the same hard path, side by side, for a long time. She deserves to spend the last years of her life in some security. So do you. Please take care of Miss Dickinson, just as you did me, and please accept this money in the spirit it’s offered. I always felt bad about taking your car when I left. Never doubt that I appreciate what you did for me.
He sat with the engine idling at a purr, wondering how many neighbors stood behind curtains and blinds peering out. A hummingbird fell from nowhere and hovered by his open window, framed perfectly, before again rocketing away. Nor was he one to remain long in place or past. Always another open road ahead. And much to get done back in Phoenix.
Going downstream, Phoenix to Tucson, there was the blackened, corkscrew-gnarled, unimaginably old saguaro that got decorated with broad red ribbons each Christmas, and that made him smile every time he saw it. Heading back, he always watched out for signs alongside the orchards just short of the halfway mark. Picacho Peak had seen the westernmost battle of the Civil War, when Union cavalry came upon a group of Confederates on their way to warn the Tucson garrison of Union encroachment. Yearly reenactments of the battle included cavalry, infantry, and artillery units—a far cry from the twenty-three horsemen and ninety-minute duration of the original. The area also hosted one of three units of the state prison at Florence.
So, back up the road, toward Picacho, past signs discreetly warning that hitchhikers might be escaped prisoners.
Driver thinking, Aren’t we all?
Road signs bore the marks of old target practice. Birds burrowed into the cactus and built nests there.
— • —
Bill’s eyes came open. He’d spent a lot of time lying awake trying to decide whether that ceiling was green or gray. And wondering why they would build ceilings so high in a place where people were steadily shrinking.
From down the hall came the smell of weak coffee, and behind that the smell of what had been spilled on the warmer plate and was now burning. Two staff members stood just outside his room talking about what they did last night. The food cart delivering breakfast to those unable to make it to the dining room limped and banged along on its bad wheel. Shortly after settling in, Bill had offered to fix the wheel. They looked at him oddly and said thank you but they had someone to do things like that. He soon got used to that look. And apparently their someone was hard to find.
Gray. Green. Who the fuck cared. One of his early partners, who’d been a William too, so he was Bill and the partner got to be Billy, everyone called them Bill Squared—Billy had painted his house all beige. Everything. Outside, inside, every wall. Beige couch. Beige curtains. Over the years he’d swear Billy had become beige himself.
That was what being in this place was like.
In the dream from which he awakened, the bullets had struck softly, dimpling, then casting up puffs of dust and debris. They made soft pops, like the sound of lips being pulled gently apart.
The bullets (my bullets, as he always thought of them, the ones intended for me) had gone into the wall to his left and right. The shooter was nervous and new at this. The shooter was twelve years old.
That wasn’t how it happened, soft, slow. In life it happened fast. In an instant. But in the dream it got stretched, extended, elongated, it just went on and on…like his life here.
Dream. Memory. Who the fuck cared.
Once it was over, his partner was bleeding out and the kid lay dead by the wall.
— • —
Back when Driver was first discovering his gift, first realizing that cars and his life were inextricably intertwined, whenever things went wrong, with the family, one of the kids, or within the community, Jorge’s abuela would say, “You’ve seen the tip of the wolf’s ear.” Over the years he’d seen his share of ear tips, and of wolves.
He was at Boyd’s, fine-tuning the Ford following the Tucson jaunt. Outside, day gave way to night by a kind of gentlemen’s agreement, neither losing face: light still strong as shadows moved in from nearby hills and taller buildings. Pushing out from under the car he saw that, while the radio blared and lights blazed and tools lay where they had been in use, on floors and benches and hoods, he was alone. The other mechanics and workers and hangers-on were gone.
Instinctively he got to his feet, taking a long socket wrench with him.
What was it about these guys going around in pairs?
One stayed by the door as the other stepped toward him. Rail-thin, musculature standing out on his arms like add-ons. Never glanced at the wrench, but halfway
across he held up his hands palm out.
Driver moved out from the car. Don’t want your back to the wall.
“A word, young man, nothing more. We’re not a threat.” Keeping the one hand in place, palm out, he stepped sideways to lower the radio’s volume. Accordion, fiddle, and guitarron fell away from the ear, became almost internal, part of the heartbeat.
“You had a pleasant trip earlier today?”
Driver nodded. Getting weirder all the time.
“While you were gone, you had callers. Left to their own wiles, and for no good reason—nothing to look for, nothing to find—they made a mess of your most recent home. A mistake those two will not be making again.”
His eyes went momentarily around the garage, taking it all in, then to the Fairlane.
“The car does not look like much.”
“That’s not what she’s about.”
The man dipped his head in affirmation. The skin on his forehead was deeply pleated, ridges that ran from his eyes right up to his hairline. You could plant crops in there.
“These men, the ones who came into your home, were expendable. Coins to be tossed. The ones who sent them, those with substance, are displeased with you.”
“I suspect they’re displeased with a lot of things.”
“There is that. But, first the man at the mall. Now these two.”
“With which I had nothing to do.”
“Those who sent them will assume otherwise.”
Driver was shifting around, watching both men closely, their reactions, body language, eyes. “What am I to these people?”
“A danger, imagined or otherwise? An irritant? An imperfection? Something to be removed. But—” His eyes followed Driver’s to the one posted at the door—“I don’t speak for them.”
Looking back, he moved slowly toward the Fairlane as Driver circled away, and rested a hand momentarily on the car’s hood.
“They have a smell to them, don’t they,” he said, “the good ones.”
Carefully he lifted the windshield wiper, tucked a card beneath, and eased it down.
“Mr. Beil asks that you have dinner with him. The time and address are on the card. He asks that I tell you it will be the best meal of your life.”
“I don’t—”
“Be hungry, Mr. West.”
Driver watched them leave, heard the car spit and catch and pull away. Momentarily the others began drifting in by various passways, all eyes going first to Driver. Soon the music was back up, the clangs and revs and burr of power tools back in place.
The card was thick stock, light blue with embossed silver letters, just the name, James Beil. Inscribed on the back in handwriting every bit as precise as the printing:
Fifth Corner, off 16th Ave, 9 p.m. A little over two hours away.
“Everything good?” It was the guy with the clown-puke BKs.
“Está bien.”
“We were not far. We were watching, all of us.”
Like most statements, Driver thought, you could read it more than one way. But he nodded and said that was good to hear.
The man started off but, before Driver could put down the wrench, turned. “We had your back, is what I mean to say.”
— • —
Beil lifted his cup. Steam passed like a sweep of rain across his glasses. He blinked. “Do you know who I am?”
“Not the sous chef, I take it.”
“Hardly.”
“No clue, then.”
“Good. As it should be.” He downed a slug of the coffee. “Something we appear to have in common.” He drank again and set the cup down empty. “Among other things, I own this restaurant. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for you, thought we might have a drink first. Your preference is single malt, I believe.” A waiter stepped up carrying a crystal tumbler. “From Orkney. This Scotch has spent an appreciable time in its cask. Waiting, as it were?”
Driver lifted the glass in thanks and sipped, held it in his mouth.
“Age twelve, you watched your mother kill your father. You then lived for four years with a couple named Smith in Tucson—they are still in the house, by the way. Leaving with no good-byes, you became a stunt driver in L.A., one of the best, they say. I have seen your work, and would agree. It was the other career that didn’t go so well.
“You fall away from sight at that point, leaving bodies behind this time instead of a home. You surface a bit later, a new day, a new city, as Paul West. Years pass and again you vanish, only to pop up—or to stay low, it might better be said—here.
“Ah…and here it is.”
Driver thinking back to what Felix said, they know more about me than anyone should, as waiters lowered plates and platters onto the table. A pasta dish with clams, veal in a wine sauce studded with bright red peppers and capers, a cutting board of prosciutto and cheeses, a bowl of salad. Glasses set out for white and red wines. Sparkling water.
“Eat. Please.”
Driver tried to remember the last time he had done so. He’d had a breakfast burrito, what, yesterday, eleven or so in the morning? Once he’d served himself, the waiters conveyed the platters down the table to Beil, who spooned out small portions from each. They ate without speaking. Sounds gradually subsided past the doors to this private dining room.
“The restaurant is closing early tonight,” Beil said.
Looking around, Driver realized that the waiters had withdrawn. They were alone.
Beil finished with a final bite of salad, placed the fork on his plate diagonally, and crossed it with his knife. He poured himself fresh tea from a tulip-shaped pitcher. Sweet tea in the Southern fashion, Driver had discovered. He’d put the glass down and not touched it since.
“I grew up in Texas,” Beil said. “Not in the piney woods and not in any town, but in the wild, unclaimed stretches—unclaimable, really. Bare land every way you looked, and the horizon so far off it may as well have been The Great Hereafter. My mother and father were there but forever busy, he as foreman for one of the huge ranches, she as librarian for the county library in the nearest town. I had my room at the rear of the house, all but a separate domicile, and there I went about feeling my way along the years, putting together a life from pieces of things, shiny things, discarded things, useless things, that I found around me, much as a bird builds its nest.
“In many ways it was like living in another country, another world. Even the air was different. The wind would shift, and you’d smell cattle, their rankness, their manure, coming from the ranch where my father worked, miles and miles away. Smells of earth, mold, stale water, and rot as well. And dust. Always the smell of dust. I’d lie in bed at night in absolute darkness thinking this might be a little what it was like being buried. I knew I had to get out of there.”
A crash sounded far off, back in the kitchen perhaps. Beil’s eyes didn’t go to the sound, but a smile came close to touching down on his lips. “Do you believe that some are born with a proclivity, a talent? For music, say, or for leadership?”
Driver nodded. “Only a few find it.”
“Exactly. Mine, I realized early on, was for problem solving. But I was also something of a contrarian, not as much interested in confronting problems as I was in finding a way around them. It would have made of me an extremely poor scientist, the discipline at which I first dabbled, but in other pursuits….Well, there you are, as they say.”
“And here I am.”
“Wondering why, no doubt.”
“It was an interesting invitation.”
“We work with what we have. You once drove, and now you drive again. Is that recidivism? Adaptive behavior? Or simply returning to what you are?”
“Yes would probably answer all those.”
“People attempting to kill you might well be construed a problem.”
“For which you have the solution.”
“Not at all. The problem is yours.” All sound from the restaurant had ceased. Through a small pane of glass in the door Driver sa
w the lights go out. “A solution, though—this could be another thing we have in common.”
Afterward, he drove to South Mountain. Well past
eleven, and not a lot of activity out here, two or three convenience stores, a scatter of Mexican drive-throughs along Baseline. He found a boulder halfway up and sat looking down at the city’s lights. Planes came and went from the airport ten or twelve miles away, ripples in the dark and silence and boundless sky.
Driver didn’t want to go back to the new place, trashed or not. He couldn’t think of any place he did want to go. What he wanted was to get back in the car and drive. Drive away from all this. Or just drive. Like the guy back at the garage had said: just you and the road, leaving all the rest of this shit behind.
