Driven

by James Sallis

  Guy has money to burn, he winds up here? Driver thought.

  But not his idea, most likely.

  Slats in the blinds fell back into place as Driver approached. Felix opened the door without speaking.

  Inside, a man in his late sixties sat watching CNN, a news report about upcoming democratic elections somewhere halfway across the world. Driver tried to remember the last time he’d seen a seersucker suit. The man was sipping whiskey from a plastic cup, not cheap stuff from the smell of it. So was Felix.

  “Doyle.” Felix nodded toward the corner. Doyle had light blue eyes, an expression that could be a wide smile or pain. Looked younger than Driver knew he must be. Mom’s favorite, a good all-American boy.

  Doyle nodded.

  The older man glanced away from the TV. “You’re the driver.” Then to Doyle: “He doesn’t look quite dead.”

  “No sir. I suppose I did stretch the truth just a little.”

  Felix poured more for himself, then for the man in the chair. “Doyle persuaded Mr. Dunaway, by way of an anonymous phone call, that those pursuing you had finally been successful, and that you’d left behind something in which he might well be interested. ‘Something to do with Blanche?’ Mr. Dunaway asked.

  “Doyle followed him, picked him up here at Sky Harbor. Too many walls and fences back in New Orleans, the need was to get him away.”

  “And out here to the golden west,” Doyle said. “He came along without protest. At the airport.”

  The man said, “Rabbits that survive know when to go to ground.”

  Driver moved around to meet his eyes. “You’re a rabbit, Mr. Dunaway?”

  “A survivor. And surrounded by foxes. Like him.” Dunaway pointed to the TV. Driver turned to look. An elderly man with his arms in the air, circled by others, all young, wearing rags and tatters of uniforms and carrying automatic weapons. “Strange missions. We’re all chockful of strange missions. Often we don’t even know what they are. But they push us, they ride us.”

  “You’re saying you didn’t choose to pursue me?”

  “Not at all. That was one thing I understood. But the rest…”

  “Who was Blanche, sir?”

  “Only a sweet, troubled girl. They’re everywhere. All around us.”

  He said nothing more. They listened to a car pull into the lot outside, sit with speakers blasting, and pull away.

  “Why are you trying to kill me, Mr. Dunaway?”

  The screen showed hundreds of birds rising from a lake. It was as though the surface of the lake itself were drifting skyward. Dunaway glanced there, then back.

  “Kill you? Not at all. Quite the contrary.”

  He finished his Scotch and set the cup on the floor.

  “The story’s not much different from what you hear from parents everywhere, We did what we could. We could see her getting wilder every year, every day. Small things at first, stealing from friends, shoplifting, then gone for days at a time. One night she’s passed out in bed with all her clothes on and I’m looking in her purse hoping I won’t find drugs, and I don’t. I find a gun. Not long after that, she was gone for good.”

  “Blanche was your daughter.”

  Dunaway nodded. “We knew she was bad, just a lost person, hurtful, destructive. But that made no difference.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You were with her.”

  “When she was killed. Yes sir, I was.”

  “Wasn’t likely to play out any other way. Her life.”

  “No.”

  “We did what we could. Once my wife was gone…” Dunaway broke off eye contact to look back at the screen. “Blanche was my only child. You took her from me.”

  “No sir, the man who did that died moments after she did.”

  “I’d been searching for her. One of the private detectives I hired came to my house to tell me he’d found her. Bubble of hope, for a moment there. I remember he was wearing jeans—pressed jeans with a sport coat. And a shiny shirt, like satin. Blanche had died two weeks before.”

  No one said anything. Doyle watched the door and window, Felix watched the old man. Felix had no expression on his face. Dunaway’s sadness filled the room like an unseen gas.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill you, young man. Quite the contrary. I wanted you alive, to go on feeling what it’s like to have the person most important to you taken away, to carry that around for the rest of your life.”

  “Elsa? Those two men came for Elsa, not for me?”

  “That was the plan. I don’t think they realized who, or what, you are. Few apparently do. And the plan…”

  All became quiet again. Two or three rooms away, a telephone rang.

  “Never mind the plan,” Dunaway said. “Things got complicated, the way things do. Might I have one last drink? I assume you brought me here to kill me.”

  Felix poured and the old man drank. Onscreen, cameras panned across acre after acre of drifting dunes.

  “Understand,” Dunaway said, “that this would come as a great relief.”

  — • —

  “He’s back in New Orleans.” Where, in a moment of strangeness Doyle had said, the magnolia blossoms smell like sweet human flesh.

  “Cruelty or compassion?” Bill asked.

  Driver shrugged.

  Bill and Nate Sanderson had met him at a Filiberto’s on Indian School, and now they were walking along the canal, dodging crazed bikers and dogwalkers as evening settled about them. Bill was playing hooky again.

  “So that part is over,” Bill said.

  “For some time, really.”

  “The world’s never what we think it is.”

  They stopped to look down into the canal: three shopping carts had been neatly stacked like auditorium chairs, a worn blanket rolled, tied with strings into a facsimile human, and set atop them. Water flowed through the carts, up to the blanketman’s bent knees.

  “Beautify your city,” Bill said. Then, “Nate and I had another talk with Bennie Capel. But this time at home, with his wife there. Bennie at home’s not the Bennie you see elsewhere. Janis and I go back a ways too.”

  It took him a while, and it wasn’t in the neighborhood of smooth, but Bill stepped off the path and sat on the graveled side of the canal, legs down along the curve of the bank. Driver sat beside him. They looked back at Sanderson, who shook his head. “Bad knees.”

  “It was a favor among old friends, from Dunaway’s life back in Brooklyn. A simple take-down, they’re in, they’re done, they’re out. But when it didn’t go that way, the bigger fish had to wonder what the hell happened. They dispatch two of their wing men and some guy in Bumfuck, Arizona wiped the street with them? That does not happen.”

  “It was Elsa they were sent after.”

  “Up to that point, yeah. But then the eyes go to you. They talk to Dunaway, they talk to his detectives, his informants. They get answers. And finally they make the connection. This Nino, and Bernie Rose. Two more of theirs, and from a long time back, but they got memories. Dunaway’s out of the picture now. Blood’s coming up in their eyes.”

  “You do make an impression,” Sanderson said.

  “I have Bennie’s word.” Bill picked up a piece of gravel and tossed it in. “His people won’t touch you. Doesn’t mean that when the plane from the east coast lands there won’t be others getting off it.”

  “That much, I’d figured out.” Driver watched as an athletic shoe rafted lazily down the canal. For a moment he thought he saw a face peering out, a rat, a hamster. “You’re making this a habit, going over the wall.”

  “Well…seems I’ve had my fill of spaghetti and jello. This time, I won’t be going back.”

  “Good plan. What’ll you do?”

  “Who knows? Play it by ear, see where life leads, I guess.”

  “Still a good plan. And your friend Wendell? What’s he going to do without you?”

  “Oh, I suspect we’ll be getting together for coffee. Maybe a night on the town, though at o
ur age it’ll be a short night. And I suspect he won’t be long finding someone else to badger.”

  “It’s been good getting to know you, Bill. Walking beside you.”

  “Right back at you, young man. One thing?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go by and see my girl?”

  — • —

  Driver had tucked the Fairlane away on the middle level of a three-tier parking garage by an office building populated chiefly by doctors of the asthma, spinal injury, and cardiac sort. Lots of repeat business, lots of comings and goings, easy access and exit. As he emerged from the bare-bones stairwell, cement and featureless gray paint, a figure stepped from the shadow by his car.

  “I thought I might come to you, this last time,” Beil said. “To thank you for your assistance. And to give you this.”

  A business card embossed with only a phone number.

  “Should you ever find yourself…at a total loss, let us say…call that number.”

  Driver held up the card. “I did nothing to help you.”

  “Ah, but you did, even if you are unable to see it. We so rarely understand what effects our actions have. Or will have. We in some strange power’s employ.”

  A Ford F-150 swung up the ramp and too fast around the curve, braking just inches behind a Buick backing out. The Buick’s elderly driver also hit his brakes, and sat unmoving. The pickup’s horn blew.

  “You’re a strange power?” Driver said.

  “Not at all. Only one of many, indeed most, caught in between. Like you.” Beil stepped closer. “Ride lightly, as your friend Felix would say, and with an eye always to the mirror. Bennie’s tigers will not harm you. About the others, we can do nothing. For now.”

  Driver nodded.

  “And so, again,” Beil said, “you disappear. Though—” He held up a closed fist, turned it palm upward, opened it—“is that not, deep within yourself, down where the blind fish live, perhaps what you wanted all along?”

  The pickup pulled into the space left vacant by the Buick. Its door opened, and first one crutch, then another, emerged. The driver hopped down between them, wearing yellow and purple running shoes.

  Beil turned back. “My wife suffers from dementia. Nothing filigree and trendy such as Alzheimer’s, mind you, but plain old dementia. Each morning as I leave I go to kiss her and she tells me, I love you like butter, every morning for eleven, twelve years. This morning what she said, with no notion that something was wrong, something was different, was: I love you like rubber. Take the lesson from my wife. Love your life like butter. Like rubber.”

  Driver walked to the edge and moments later watched Beil come out of the stairwell. Two black sedans pulled up immediately at curbside.

  — • —

  He got out of the Fairlane, walked around to the front of the garage. She straightened and leaned to look past the open hood of a ’57 Chevy Bel Air. The clamp floodlight on her bench was on. With the light behind her, he couldn’t see her face.

  “You’ve come to say good-bye.”

  Driver nodded.

  “I saw you back there. Then you waited.” She reached behind to snap off the light, stepped to the car’s side. “Never gets easy, does it?”

  “I’ve had practice.”

  “You have, but I don’t mean saying good-bye. Making choices.”

  She popped the top of the cooler under her bench, handed him a beer, got one herself.

  “Our eyes bounce off surfaces, we can’t see far or deep. We make choices from the pitifully little we understand about who we are, held in place by that. Then we hold our breaths fully expecting the heavens to tear open at any minute. All of us do that, Eight. Not just you.”

  Again he thought about Bernie, Time you’re ten, twelve years old, it’s pretty much set in you, what you’re going to be like, what your life’s going to be.

  “Comforting,” he said.

  “It is, in a way. Like this.” Billie held up her beer. “It’s all a storm, Eight. But we have these bright days, these calms.”

  “You were one.”

  She laughed. “You bet your ass I was. Now get out of here, I’ve got work to do—once I undo what all the heads that have been under this hood before did to the poor girl.”

  They picked him up just outside Mesa, a Chrysler and a BMW. He cut off and back onto I-10, jumped an exit and feeder road to head back toward Phoenix, then clipped off again and on toward Tucson. Feared for a while that he might have lost them and pulled over. Sat at roadside, the Indian casino’s electronic billboard flashing against his windshield, semis whipping by, waiting. Till there they were. When the two cars drew within easy distance he peeled out ahead, braked and wheeled his way into a 180, drove behind and spun again, came up behind them and shot past.

  In the rearview mirror he watched them moving toward him. He turned the radio on. He smiled.

  He drove.

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