“I don’t know.”
“Hey that was when she was on her Self-Dependence kick. She was into Lifespring and Est and Amway and all that. They keep telling her she’s not responsible for other people, not responsible, not responsible—”
“She went for it like a fucking fish to water, man.” He gives Cal a look that means, no bullshit. “What is it she wants now?”
“Um—I think she wants you to go to some vocational school.”
Jody makes a snorting sound up in his sinuses. “Fuck that. Open up your car, Cal, I ain’t going.”
“Look, she’s just trying to help. What the hell’s wrong with having a skill? It doesn’t mean you can’t do something else too—”
“Cal. She gave you the Subaru, it ain’t mine. But you’re gonna open the fucking thing up.” He hopes Cal knows how serious he is. Because that two-dimensional feeling might come on him, if he doesn’t get out of here. Words just spill out of him. “Cal, look at this fucking place. Look at this place and tell me about vocational skills. It’s shit, Cal. There’s two things in the world, dude. There’s making it like Bon Jovi, like Eddie Murphy—that’s one thing. You’re on a screen, you’re on videos and CDs. Or there’s shit. That’s the other thing. There’s no fucking thing in between. There’s being Huge—and there’s being nothing.” His voice breaking. “We’re shit, Cal. Open up the fucking car or I’ll kick your headlights in.”
Cal stares at him. Then he unlocks the car, his movements short and angry. Jody gets in, looking at a sign on the other side of the parking lot, one of those electronic signs with the lights spelling things out with moving words. The sign says, You want it, we got it . . . you want it, we got it . . . you want it, we got it . . .
He wanted a Luger. They look rad in war movies. Jody said it was James Coburn, Annie said it was Lee Marvin, but whoever it was, he was using a Luger in that Peckinpah movie Iron Cross.
But what Jody ends up with is a Smith-Wesson .32, the magazine carrying eight rounds. It’s smaller than he’d thought it would be, a scratched gray-metal weight in his palm. They buy four boxes of bullets, drive out to the country, out past Topanga Canyon. They find a fire road of rutted salmon-colored dirt, lined with pine trees on one side; the other side has a margin of grass that looks like soggy Shredded Wheat, and a barbed wire fence edging an empty horse pasture.
They take turns with the gun, Annie and Jody, shooting Bud-Light bottles from a splintery gray fence post. A lot of the time they miss the bottles. Jody said, “This piece’s pulling to the left.” He isn’t sure if it really is, but Annie seems to like when he talks as if he knows about it.
It’s nice out there, he likes the scent of gunsmoke mixed with the pine tree smell. Birds were singing for awhile, too, but they stopped after the shooting, scared off. His hand hurts from the gun’s recoil, but he doesn’t say anything about that to Annie.
“What we got to do,” she says, taking a pot-shot at a squirrel, “is try shooting from the car.”
He shakes his head. “You think you’ll aim better from in a car?”
“I mean from a moving car, stupid.” She gives him a look of exasperation. “To get used to it.”
“Hey yeah.”
They get the old Buick bouncing down the rutted fire road, about thirty feet from the fence post when they pass it, and Annie fires twice, and misses. “The stupid car bounces too much on this road,” she says.
“Let me try it.”
“No wait—make it more like a city street, drive in the grass off the road. No ruts.”
“Uh . . . Okay.” So he backs up, they try it again from the grass verge. She misses again, but they keep on because she insists, and about the fourth time she starts hitting the post, and the sixth time she hits the bottle.
“Well why not?” she asks again.
Jody doesn’t like backing off from this in front of Annie, but it feels like it is too soon or something. “Because now we’re just gone and nobody knows who it is. If we hold up a store it’ll take time, they might have silent alarms, we might get caught.” They are driving with the top up, to give them some cover in case they decide to try the gun here, but the windows are rolled down because the old Buick’s air conditioning is busted.
“Oh right I’m sure some 7-11 store is going to have a silent alarm.”
“Just wait, that’s all. Let’s do this first. We got to get more used to the gun.”
“And get another one. So we can both have one.”
For some reason that scares him. But he says: “Yeah. Okay.”
It is late afternoon. They are doing 60 on the 405. Jody not wanting to get stopped by the CHP when he has a gun in his car. Besides, they are a little drunk because shooting out at Topanga Canyon in the sun made them thirsty, and this hippie on this gnarly old tractor had come along, some pot farmer maybe, telling them to get off his land, and that pissed them off. So they drank too much beer.
They get off the 405 at Burbank Boulevard, looking at the other cars, the people on the sidewalk, trying to pick someone out. Some asshole.
But no one looks right. Or maybe it doesn’t feel right. He doesn’t have that feeling on him.
“Let’s wait,” he suggests.
“Why?”
“Because it just seems like we oughta, that’s why.”
She makes a clucking sound but doesn’t say anything else for awhile. They drive past a patch of adult bookstores and a video arcade and a liquor store. They come to a park. The trash cans in the park have overflowed; wasps are haunting some melon rinds on the ground. In the basketball court four Chicanos are playing two-on-two, wearing those shiny, pointy black shoes they wear. “You ever notice how Mexican guys, they play basketball and football in dress shoes?” Jody asks. “It’s like they never heard of sneakers—”
He hears a crack and a thudding echo and a greasy chill goes through him as he realizes that she’s fired the gun. He glimpses a Chicano falling, shouting in pain, the others flattening on the tennis court, looking around for the shooter as he stomps the accelerator, lays rubber, squealing through a red light, cars bitching their horns at him, his heart going in time with the pistons, fear vising his stomach. He’s weaving through the cars, looking for the freeway entrance. Listening for sirens.
They are on the freeway, before he can talk. The rush hour traffic only doing about 45, but he feels better here. Hidden.
“What the fuck you doing?!” he yells at her.
She gives him a look accusing him of something. He isn’t sure what. Betrayal maybe. Betraying the thing they had made between them.
“Look—” he says, softer, “it was a red light. People almost hit me coming down the cross street. You know? You got to think a little first. And don’t do it when I don’t know.”
She looks at him like she is going to spit. Then she laughs, and he has to laugh too. She says, “Did you see those dweebs dive?”
Mouths dry, palms damp, they watch the five o’clock news and the six o’clock news. Nothing. Not a word about it. They sit up in the bed, drinking Coronas. Not believing it. “I mean, what kind of fucking society is this?” Jody says. Like something Cal would say. “When you shoot somebody and they don’t even say a damn word about it on TV?”
“It’s sick,” Annie says.
They try to make love but it just isn’t there. It’s like trying to start a gas stove when the pilot light is out.
So they watch “Hunter” on TV. Hunter is after a psychokiller. The psycho guy is a real creep. Set a house on fire with some kids in it, they almost got burnt up, except Hunter gets there in time. Finally Hunter corners the psychokiller and shoots him. Annie says, “I like TV better than movies because you know how it’s gonna turn out. But in movies it might have a happy ending or it might not.”
“It usually does,” Jody points out.
“Oh yeah? Did you see Terms of Endearment? And they got Bambi out again now. When I was a kid I cried for two days when his Mom got shot. They should always have h
appy endings in a little kidlet movie.”
“That part, that wasn’t the end of that movie. It was happy in the end.”
“It was still a sad movie.”
Finally at eleven o’clock they’re on. About thirty seconds worth. A man “shot in the leg on Burbank Boulevard today in a drive-by shooting believed to be gang related.” On to the next story. No pictures, nothing. That was it.
What a rip off. “It’s racist, is what it is,” he says. “Just because they were Mexicans no one gives a shit.”
“You know what it is, it’s because of all the gang stuff. Gang drive-bys happen every day, everybody’s used to it.”
He nods. She’s right. She has a real feel for these things. He puts his arm around her; she nestles against him. “Okay. We’re gonna do it right, so they really pay attention.”
“What if we get caught?”
Something in him freezes when she says that. She isn’t supposed to talk like that. Because of the thing they have together. It isn’t something they ever talk about, but they know its rules.
When he withdraws a little, she says, “But we’ll never get caught because we just do it and cruise before anyone gets together.”
He relaxes, and pulls her closer. It feels good just to lay there and hug her.
The next day he’s in line for his unemployment insurance check. They have stopped his checks, temporarily, and he’d had to hassle them. They said he could pick this one up. He had maybe two more coming.
Thinking about that, he feels a bad mood coming on him. There’s no air conditioning in this place and the fat guy in front of him smells like he’s fermenting and the room’s so hot and close Jody can hardly breathe.
He looks around and can almost see the feeling—like an effect of a camera lens, a zoom or maybe a fish eye lens: Things going two dimensional, flattening out. Annie says something and he just shrugs. She doesn’t say anything else till after he’s got his check and he’s practically running for the door.
“Where you going?”
He shakes his head, standing outside, looking around. It’s not much better outside. It’s overcast but still hot. “Sucks in there.”
“Yeah,” she says. “For sure. Oh shit.”
“What?”
She points at the car. Someone has slashed the canvas top of the Buick. “My dad is going to kill us.”
He looks at the canvas and can’t believe it. “Muther-fuhcker!”
“Fucking assholes,” she says, nodding gravely. “I mean, you know how much that costs to fix? You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Maybe we can find him.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
He still feels bad but there’s a hum of anticipation too. They get in the car, he tears out of the parking lot, making gravel spray, whips onto the street.
They drive around the block, just checking people out, the feeling in him spiraling up and up. Then he sees a guy in front of a Carl’s Jr., the guy grinning at him, nudging his friend. Couple of jock college students, looks like, in tank tops. Maybe the guy who did the roof of the car, maybe not.
They pull around the corner, coming back around for another look. Jody can feel the good part of the feeling coming on now but there’s something bothering him too: the jocks in tank tops looked right at him.
“You see those two guys?” he hears himself ask, as he pulls around the corner, cruises up next to the Carl’s Jr. “The ones—”
“Those jock guys, I know, I picked them out too.”
He glances at her, feeling close to her then. They are one person in two parts. The right and the left hand. It feels like music.
He makes sure there’s a green light ahead of him, then says, “Get ‘em both,” he hears himself say. “Don’t miss or—”
By then she’s aiming the .32, both hands wrapped around it. The jock guys, one of them with a huge coke and the other with a milkshake, are standing by the driveway to the restaurant’s parking lot, talking, one of them playing with his car keys. Laughing. The bigger one with the dark hair looks up and sees Annie and the laughing fades from his face. Seeing that, Jody feels better than he ever felt before. Crack, crack. She fires twice, the guys go down. Crack, crack, crack. Three times more, making sure it gets on the news: shooting into the windows of the Carl’s Jr., webs instantly snapping into the window glass, some fat lady goes spinning, her tray of burgers tilting, flying. Jody’s already laying rubber, fishtailing around the corner, heading for the freeway.
They don’t make it home, they’re so excited. She tells him to stop at a gas station on the other side of the hills, in Hollywood. The Men’s is unlocked, he feels really right there as she looks around then leads him into the bathroom, locks the door from the inside. Bathroom’s an almost clean one, he notices, as she hikes up her skirt and he undoes his pants, both of them with shaking fingers, in a real hurry, and she pulls him into her with no preliminaries, right there with her sitting on the edge of the sink. There’s no mirror but he sees a cloudy reflection in the shiny chrome side of the towel dispenser; the two of them blurred into one thing sort of pulsing . . .
He looks straight at her, then; she’s staring past him, not at anything in particular, just at the sensation, the good sensation they are grinding out between them, like it’s something she can see on the dust-streaked wall. He can almost see it in her eyes. And in the way she traps the end of her tongue between her front teeth. Now he can see it himself, in his mind’s eye, the sensation flashing like sun in a mirror; ringing like a power chord through a fuzz box . . .
When he comes he doesn’t hold anything back, he can’t, and it escapes from him with a sob. She holds him tight and he says, “Wow you are just so awesome you make me feel so good . . .”
He’s never said anything like that to her before, and they know they’ve arrived somewhere special. “I love you, Jody,” she says.
“I love you.”
“It’s just us, Jody. Just us. Just us.”
He knows what she means. And they feel like little kids cuddling together, even though they’re fucking standing up in a Union 76 Men’s restroom, in the smell of pee and disinfectant.
Afterwards they’re really hungry so they go to a Jack-in-the-Box, get drive-through food, ordering a whole big shitload. They eat it on the way home, Jody trying not to speed, trying to be careful again about being stopped, but hurrying in case they have a special news flash on TV about the Carl’s Jr. Not wanting to miss it.
The Fajita Pita from Jack-in-the-Box tastes really great.
While he’s eating, Jody scribbles some song lyrics into his song notebook with one hand. “The Ballad of Jody and Annie.”
They came smokin’ down the road
like a bat out of hell
they hardly even slowed
or they’d choke from the smell
Chorus:
Holdin’ hands in the Valley of Death
(repeat 3X)
Jody and Annie bustin’ out of bullshit
Bustin’ onto TV
better hope you aren’t the one hit
killed disonnerably
Nobody understands ‘em
nobody ever will
but Jody knows she loves ‘im
They never get their fill
They will love forever
in history
and they’ll live together
in femmy
Holdin’ hands in the Valley of Death
He runs out of inspiration there. He hints heavily to Annie about the lyrics and pretends he doesn’t want her to read them, makes her ask three times. With tears in her eyes, she asks, as she reads the lyrics, “What’s a femmy?”
“You know, like ‘Living In femmy.’ ”
“Oh, infamy. It’s so beautiful . . . You got guacamole on it, you asshole.” She’s crying with happiness and using a napkin to reverently wipe the guacamole from the notebook paper.
There’s no special news flash but since three peop
le died and two are in intensive care, they are the top story on the five o’clock news. And at seven o’clock they get mentioned on CNN, which is national. Another one, and they’ll be on the “NBC Nightly News,” Jody says.
“I’d rather be on ‘World News Tonight,’ ” Annie says. “I like that Peter Jennings dude. He’s cute.”
About ten, they watch the videotapes of the news stories again. Jody guesses he should be bothered that the cops have descriptions of them but somehow it just makes him feel more psyched, and he gets down with Annie again. They almost never do it twice in one day, but this makes three times. “I’m getting sore,” she says, when he enters her. But she gets off.
They’re just finishing, he’s coming, vaguely aware he sees lights flashing at the windows, when he hears Cal’s voice coming out of the walls. He thinks he’s gone schizophrenic or something, he’s hearing voices, booming like the voice of God. “Jody, come on outside and talk to us. This is Cal, you guys. Come on out.”
Then Jody understands, when Cal says, “They want you to throw the gun out first.”
Jody pulls out of her, puts his hand over her mouth, and shakes his head. He pulls his pants on, then goes into the front room, looks through a corner of the window. There’s Cal, and a lot of cops.
Cal’s standing behind the police barrier, the cruiser lights flashing around him; beside him is a heavyset Chicano cop who’s watching the S.W.A.T. team gearing up behind the big gray van. They’re scary-looking in all that armor and with those helmets and shotguns and sniper rifles.
Jody spots Annie’s Dad. He’s tubby, with a droopy mustache, long hair going bald at the crown, some old hippie, sitting in the back of a cruiser. Jody figures someone got their license number. He can picture the whole thing: The cops had the license number, took them awhile to locate Annie’s Dad. He wasn’t home at first. They waited till he came home, since he owns the car, and after they talked to him they decided it was his daughter and her boyfriend they were looking for. Got the address from him. Drag Cal over here to talk to Jody because Mom wouldn’t come. Yeah.
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