The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  She chose the latter course, which was the mistaken one to choose.

  Long before she'd been able to identify the filling station exactly for the information operator to get its number, the whole thing had become academic. There was a slither and shuffle on the gravel outside and a car, someone's car, had come to a stop in front of the house.

  Her first impulse, carried out immediately without thinking why, was to snap off all the room lights. Probably so she could see out without being seen from out there.

  She sprang over to the window, and then stood there rigidly motionless, leaning a little to peer intently out. The car had stopped at an unlucky angle of perspective—unlucky for her. They had a trellis with tendrils of wisteria twining all over it like bunches of dangling grapes. It blanked out the midsection of the car, its body shape, completely. The beams of the acetylene-bright headlights shone out past one side, but they told her nothing; they could have come from any car. The little glimmer of color on the driveway, at the other side, told her no more.

  She heard the door crack open and clump closed. Someone's feet, obviously a man's, chopped up the wooden steps to the entrance veranda, and she saw a figure cross it, but it was too dark to make out who he was.

  She had turned now to face the other way, and without knowing it her hand was holding the place where her heart was. This was Mark's house, he had the front-door key. Garry would have to ring. She waited to hear the doorbell clarinet out and tell her she was safe, she would be loved, she would live.

  Instead there was a double click, back then forth, the knob twined around, and the door opened. A spurt of cool air told her it had opened.

  Frightened back into childhood fears, she turned and scurried, like some little girl with pigtails flying out behind her, scurried back along the shadowed hall, around behind the stairs, and into a closet that lay back there, remote as any place in the house could be. She pushed herself as far to the back as she could, and crouched down, pulling hanging things in front of her to screen and to protect her, to make her invisible. Sweaters and mackintoshes and old forgotten coveralls. And she hid her head down between her knees—the way children do when a goblin or an ogre is after them, thinking that if they can't see it, that fact alone will make the terror go away.

  The steps went up the stairs, on over her, up past her head. She could feel the shake if not hear the sound. Then she heard her name called out, but the voice was blurred by the many partitions and separations between—as if she were listening to it from underwater. Then the step came down again, and the man stood there at the foot of the stairs, uncertain. She tried to teach herself how to forget to breathe, but she learned badly.

  There was a little tick! of a sound, and he'd given himself more light. Then each step started to sound clearer than the one before, as the distance to her thinned away. Her heart began to stutter and turn over, and say: here he comes, here he comes. Light cracked into the closet around three sides of the door, and two arms reached in and started to make swimming motions among the hanging things, trying to find her.

  Then they found her, one at each shoulder, and lifted her and drew her outside to him. (With surprising gentleness.) And pressed her to his breast. And her tears made a new pattern of little wet polka dots all over what had been Garry's solid-colored necktie until now.

  All she could say was "Hurry, hurry, get me out of here!"

  "You must have left the door open in your hurry when you came back here. I tried it, found it unlocked, and just walked right in. When I looked back here, I saw that the sleeve of that old smock had got caught in the closet door and was sticking out. Almost like an arm, beckoning me on to show me where you were hiding. It was uncanny. Your guardian angel must love you very much, Linda."

  But will he always? she wondered. Will he always?

  He took her to the front door, detoured for a moment to pick up the bag, then led her outside and closed the door behind them for good and all.

  "Just a minute," she said, and stopped, one foot on the ground, one still on the wooden front steps.

  She opened her handbag and took out her key—the key to what had been her home and her marriage. She flung it back at the door, and it hit and fell, with a cheap shabby little clop!—like something of not much value.

  Once they were in the car they just drove; they didn't say anything more for a long time.

  All the old things had been said. All the new things to be said were still to come.

  In her mind's eye she could see the saw-toothed towers of New York climbing slowly up above the horizon before her at the end of the long road. Shimmering there, iridescent, opalescent, rainbows of chrome and glass and hope. Like Jerusalem, like Mecca, or some other holy spot. Beckoning, offering heaven. And of all the things New York has meant to various people at various times—fame, success, fulfillment—it probably never meant as much before as it meant to her tonight: a place of refuge, a sanctuary, a place to be safe in.

  "How long does the trip take?" she asked him wistful-eyed.

  "I usually make it in less than four hours. Toni ght I'll make it in less than three."

  I'll never stray out of New York again, she promised herself. Once I'm safely there, I'll never go out in the country again. I never want to see a tree again, except way down below me in Central Park from a window high up.

  "Oh, get me there, Garry, get me there."

  "I'll get you there," Garry promised, like any new bridegroom, and bent to kiss the hand she had placed over his on the wheel.

  Two car headlights from the opposite direction hissed by them—like parallel tracer bullets going so fast they seemed to swirl around rather than undulate with the road's flaws.

  She purposely waited a moment, then said in a curiously surreptitious voice, as though it shouldn't be mentioned too loudly, "Did you see that?"

  All he answered, noncommittally, was "Mmm"

  "That was the Italian compact."

  "You couldn't tell what it was," he said, trying to distract her from her fear. "Went by too fast."

  "I know it too well. I recognized it."

  Again she waited a moment, as though afraid to make the movement she was about to. Then she turned and looked back, staring hard and steadily into the funneling darkness behind them.

  Two back lights had flattened out into a bar, an ingot. Suddenly this flashed to the other side of the road, then reversed. Then, like a ghastly scimitar chopping down all the tree trunks in sight, the headlights reappeared, rounded out into two spheres, gleaming, small—but coming back after them.

  "I told you. It's turned and doubled back."

  He was still trying to keep her from panic. "May have nothing to do with us. May not be the same car we saw go by just now."

  "It is. Why would he make a complete about-turn like that in the middle of nowhere? There's no intersection or side road back there—we haven't passed one for miles."

  She looked again.

  "They keep coming. And they already look bigger than when they started back. I think they're gaining on us."

  He said, with an unconcern that he didn't feel, "Then we'll have to put a stop to that."

  They burst into greater velocity, with a surge like a forward billow of air.

  She looked, and she looked again. Finally, to keep from turning so constantly, she got up on the seat on the point of one knee and faced backward, her hair pouring forward all around her, jumping with an electricity that was really speed.

  "Stay down," he warned. "You're liable to get thrown that way. We're up to sixty-five now." He gave her a quick tug for additional emphasis, and she subsided into the seat once more.

  "How is it now?" he checked presently. The rearview mirror couldn't refl ect that far back.

  "They haven't grown smaller, but they haven't grown larger."

  "We've stabilized, then," he translated. "Dead heat."

  Then after another while and another look, "Wait a minute!" she said suddenly on a note of breath-holding
hope. Then, "No," she mourned quickly afterward. "For a minute I thought—but they're back again. It was only a dip in the road.

  "They hang on like leeches, can't seem to shake them off", she complained in a fretful voice, as though talking to herself. "Why don't they go away? Why don't they?"

  Another look, and he could sense the sudden stiffening of her body.

  "They're getting bigger. I know I'm not mistaken."

  He could see that, too. They were finally peering into the rearview mirror for the first time. They'd go offside, then they'd come back in again. In his irritation he took one hand off the wheel long enough to give the mirror a backhand slap that moved it out of focus altogether.

  "Suppose I stop, get out, and face him when he comes up, and we have it out here and now. What can he do? I'm younger, I can outslug him."

  Her refusal to consent was an outright scream of protest. All her fears and all her aversion were in it.

  "All right," he said. "Then we'll run him into the ground if we have to."

  She covered her face with both hands—not at the speed they were making, but at the futility of it.

  "They sure build good cars in Torino, damn them to hell!" he swore in angry frustration.

  She uncovered and looked. The headlights were closer than before. She began to lose control of herself.

  "Oh, this is like every nightmare I ever had when I was a little girl! When something was chasing me, and I couldn't get away from it. Only now there'll be no waking up in the nick of time."

  "Stop that," he shouted at her. "Stop it. It only makes it worse, it doesn't help."

  "I think I can feel his breath blowing down the back of my neck."

  He looked at her briefly, but she could tell by the look on his face he hadn't been able to make out what she'd said.

  Streaks of wet that were not tears were coursing down his face in uneven lengths. "My necktie," he called out to her suddenly, and raised his chin to show her what he meant. She reached over, careful not to place herself in front of him, and pulled the knot down until it was loose. Then she freed the buttonhole from the top button of his shirt.

  A long curve in the road cut them off for a while, from those eyes, those unrelenting eyes behind them. Then the curve ended, and the eyes came back again. It was worse somehow, after they'd been gone like that, than when they remained steadily in sight the whole time.

  "He holds on and holds on and holds on—like a mad dog with his teeth locked into you."

  "He's a mad dog all right." All pretense of composure had long since left him. He was lividly angry at not being able to win the race, to shake the pursuer off. She was mortally frightened. The long-sustained tension of the speed duel, which seemed to have been going on for hours, compounded her fears, raised them at last to the pitch of hysteria.

  Their car swerved erratically, the two outer wheels jogged briefly over marginal stones and roots that felt as if they were as big as boulders and logs. He flung his chest forward across the wheel as if it were something alive that he was desperately trying to hold down; then the car recovered, came back to the road, straightened out safely again with a catarrhal shudder of its rear axle.

  "Don't," he warned her tautly in the short-lived lull before they picked up hissing momentum again. "Don't grab me like that again. It went right through the shoulder of my jacket. I can't manage the car, can't hold it, if you do that. I'll get you away. Don't worry, I'll get you away from him"

  She threw her head back in despair, looking straight up overhead. "We seem to be standing still. The road has petrified. The trees aren't moving backwards anymore. The stars don't either. Neither do the rocks along the side. Oh, faster, Garry, faster!"

  "You're hallucinating. Your senses are being tricked by fear."

  "Faster, Garry, faster!"

  "Eighty-five, eighty-six. We're on two wheels most of the time—two are off the ground. I can't even breathe, my breath's being pulled out of me."

  She started to beat her two clenched fists against her forehead in a tattoo of hypnotic inability to escape. "I don't care, Garry! Faster, faster! If I've got to die, let it be with you, not with him!"

  "I'll get you away from him. If it kills me."

  That was the last thing he said.

  If it kills me.

  And as though it had overheard, and snatched at the collateral offered it, that unpropitious sickly greenish star up there—surely Mark's star, not theirs—at that very moment a huge tremendous thing came into view around a turn in the road. A skyscraper of a long-haul van, its multiple tiers beaded with red warning lights. But what good were they that high up, except to warn off planes?

  It couldn't maneuver. It would have required a turntable. And they had no time or room.

  There was a soft crunchy sound, like someone shearing the top off a soft-boiled egg with a knife. At just one quick slice. Then a brief straight-into-the face blizzard effect, but with tiny particles of glass instead of frozen flakes. Just a one-gust blizzard—and then over with. Then an immense whirl of light started to spin, like a huge Ferris wheel all lit up and going around and around, with parabolas of light streaking off in every direction and dimming. Like shooting stars, or the tails of comets.

  Then the whole thing died down and went out, like a blazing amusement park sinking to earth. Or the spouts of illuminated fountains settling back into their basins...

  She could tell the side of her face was resting against the ground, because blades of grass were brushing against it with a feathery tickling feeling. And some inquisitive little insect kept flitting about just inside the rim of her ear. She tried to raise her hand to brush it away, but then forgot where it was and what it was.

  But then forgot...

  When they picked her up at last, more out of this world than in it, all her senses gone except for reflex-actions, her lips were still quivering with the unspoken sounds of "Faster, Garry, faster! Take me away—"

  Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and—needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle—a jab into a vein...

  Then at last her head cleared, her eyes cleared, her mind and voice came back from where they'd been. Each day she became a little stronger, and each day became a little longer. Until they were back for good, good as ever before. Life came back into her lungs and heart. She could feel it there, the swift current of it. Moving again, eager again. Sun again, sky again, rain and pain and love and hope again. Life again—the beautiful thing called life.

  Each day they propped her up in a chair for a little while. Close beside the bed, for each day for a little while longer.

  Then at last she asked, after many starts that she could never finish, "Why doesn't Garry come to me? Doesn't he know I've been hurt?"

  "Garry can't come to you," the nurse answered. And then, in the way that you whip off a bandage that has adhered to a wound fast, in order to make the pain that much shorter than it would be if you lingeringly edged it off a little at a time, then the nurse quickly told her, "Garry won't come to you anymore."

  The black tears, so many of them, such a rain of them, blotted out the light and brought on the darkness...

  Then the light was back again, and no more tears. Just—Garry won't come to you anymore.

  Now the silent words were: Not so fast, Garry, not so fast; you've left me behind and I've lost my way.

  Then in a little while she asked the nurse, "Why don't you ever let me get up from this chair? I'm better now, I eat well, the strength has come back to my arms, my hands, my fingers, my whole body feels strong. Shoul
dn't I be allowed to move around and exercise a little? To stand up and take a few steps?"

  "The doctor will tell you about that," the nurse said evasively.

  The doctor came in later and he told her about it. Bluntly, in the modern way, without subterfuges and without false hopes. The kind, the sensible, the straight-from-the-shoulder modern way.

  "Now listen to me. The world is a beautiful world, and life is a beautiful life. In this beautiful world everything is comparative; luck is comparative. You could have come out of it stone-blind from the shattered glass, with both your eyes gone. You could have come out of it minus an arm, crushed and having to be taken off. You could have come out of it with your face hideously scarred, wearing a repulsive mask for the rest of your life that would make people sicken and turn away. You could have come out of it dead, as—as someone else did. Who is to say you are lucky, who is to say you are not? You have come out of it beautiful of face. You have come out of it keen and sensitive of mind, a mind with all the precision and delicate adjustment of the works inside a fine Swiss watch. A mind that not only thinks, but feels. You have come out of it with a strong brave youthful heart that will carry you through for half a century yet, come what may."

  "But—"

  She looked at him with eyes that didn't fear.

  "You will never again take a single step for all the rest of your life. You are hopelessly, irreparably paralyzed from the waist down. Surgery, everything, has been tried. Accept this ... Now you know—and so now be brave."

  "I am. I will be," she said trustfully. "I'll learn a craft of some kind, that will occupy my days and earn me a living. Perhaps you can find a nursing home for me at the start until I get adjusted, and then maybe later I can find a little place all to myself and manage there on my own. There are such places, with ramps instead of stairs—"