by James Sallis
“He’s a thief—a professional, he keeps telling me. Started off burglarizing homes when he was fourteen, fifteen, moved on from there. They got him taking down a savings and loan. Couple of local detectives happened to walk into the middle of it. They’d come to deposit their paychecks.”
Standard did indeed get out the following month. And despite all Irina’s protests that this would not happen, no way in godalmighty hell, he came home to roost. (What can I say? she said. He loves the boy. Where else is he gonna go?) She and Driver were hanging together a lot by then, which didn’t bother Standard at all. Most nights, long after Irina and Benicio had gone to bed, Driver and Standard would sit out in the front room watching TV. Lot of the good, old stuff you only caught then, late at night.
So once, along about one on a Tuesday night, Wednesday morning really, they’re sitting there watching a cop movie, Glass Ceiling, and a commercial comes on.
“Rina tells me you drive. For the movies?”
“Right.”
“Have to be pretty good.”
“I get by.”
“Not like a nine-to-five gig, huh?”
“One of the advantages.”
“You have anything on for tomorrow? Today now, I guess it is?”
“Nothing scheduled.”
Having found its way past a thicket of commercials for furniture dealers, bedding stores, cut-rate insurance, twenty-piece cooking sets and videocassettes of great moments in American history, the movie started up again.
“I’m thinking I can speak frankly with you,” Standard said.
Driver nodded.
“Rina trusts you, I figure I can too….You want another beer?”
“Usually.”
He went out to the kitchen and brought two back. Snapped the tab off one and handed it over.
“You know what I do, right?”
“More or less.”
Snapped the tab and took a swallow of his.
“Okay. So here’s the thing. I’ve got a job today, something that’s been on the burner a long time. But my driver’s been…well, detained.”
“Like this guy,” Driver said, nodding towards the TV, where a suspect was being interrogated. The front legs of the chair on which he sat had been cut down to make it as uncomfortable as possible.
“Good chance of it. What I’m wondering is, any chance you’d consider taking his place?”
“Driving?”
“Right. We go in early morning. It’s—”
Driver held up a hand.
“I don’t need to know, don’t want to know. I’ll drive for you. That’s all I’ll do.”
“Fair enough.”
Three or four more minutes of movie action, and commercials shouldered back in. Miracle stove-top grill. Commemorative plates. Greatest hits.
“I ever tell you how much Rina and Benicio depend on you?”
“I ever tell you what an asshole you are?”
“Nah,” Standard said. “But that’s okay, just about everybody else has.”
They both laughed.
Chapter Eleven
That first run, Driver netted close to three thousand.
“Anything up?” he asked Jimmie, his agent, the next day.
“Couple of calls about to go out.”
“Cattle calls, you’re saying.”
“Okay.”
“And for this I pay you fifteen percent?”
“Welcome to the promised land.”
“Locusts and all.”
But by day’s end he had two jobs lined up. Word was getting around, Jimmie told him. Not just that he could drive, the town was full of people who could drive, but word that he’d be there when they needed him, never watched the clock, never made waves, always delivered. They know you’re a pro, not some hardass or punk out to make a name for himself, Jimmie said, you’re who they’re gonna ask for.
First shoot didn’t pick up till next week, so Driver decided to head up Tucson way for a visit. He hadn’t seen his mom since they pried her out of the chair long years past. He’d been little more than a kid then.
Why now? Hell if he knew.
As he drove, in a series of shudders the landscape changed about him. First the haphazard, old-town streets of central L.A. slowly giving way to the city’s ever-incomprehensible network of ancillary cities and suburbs, then nothing much but interstate for a long time. Gas stations, Denny’s, Del Tacos, discount malls, lumber yards. Trees, walls and fences. By this time the Galaxie had been traded in on a vintage Chevy with a hood you could land aircraft on and a backseat big enough for a small family to live in.
He stopped for breakfast at a Union 76 and watched the truckers sitting in their special section over plates of steak and eggs, roast beef, meatloaf, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak. Great American road food. Truckers, the final embodiment of America’s enduring dream of absolute freedom, forever lighting out for the territory.
The building into whose parking lot he nosed the Chevy looked and smelled like the auxiliary buildings in which Sunday-School sessions had been held when he was a kid. Cheapest possible construction, dull white walls, unadorned cement floors.
“You’re here to see…?”
“Sandra Daley.”
The receptionist peered deeply into her screen. Fingers danced nimbly on a worn keyboard.
“I can’t seem to—oh, here she is. You are…?”
“Her son.”
She picked up her phone.
“Could you have a seat over there, sir? Someone will be with you shortly.”
Within minutes a young Eurasian woman wearing a starched white lab coat, jeans beneath, came through locked doors. Low wooden heels ticked on the concrete floors.
“You’re here to see Mrs. Daley?”
Driver nodded.
“And you’re her son?”
He nodded again.
“I’m sorry. Do please forgive our caution. But records show that, all these years, Mrs. Daley has never had a visitor. Could I ask to see some ID?”
Driver displayed his driver’s license. Those days he still had one that wasn’t a double or triple blind.
Almond eyes scanned it.
“Again,” she said, “I apologize.”
“Not a problem.”
Above almond eyes her eyebrows were natural, straight across with almost no arch, a bit unkempt. He always wondered why Latinas plucked theirs only to draw in thin arched substitutes. Change yourself, you change the world?
“I regret having to tell you this: your mother died last week. There were a number of other problems, but congestive heart failure is what finally took her. An alert nurse picked up the clinical change; within the hour we had her on a ventilator. But by then it was too late. It so often is.”
She touched his shoulder.
“I’m sorry. We did our best to get in touch. Apparently what contact numbers we had were long since invalid.” Her eyes swept his face, looking for cues. “Nothing I can say will be of much help, I’m afraid.”
“It’s okay, Doctor.”
Brought up on tonal languages, she caught the slight rise in pitch at sentence’s end. He hadn’t even known it was there.
“Park,” she said. “Doctor Park. Amy.”
They both turned to watch as a gurney came into view down the corridor. Barge on the river. African Queen. A nurse sat astride the patient, pumping at his chest. “Shit!” she said. “Just felt a rib crack.”
“I barely knew her. I just thought….”
“I really must go.”
In the parking lot he leaned against the Chevy, stood looking off towards the mountain ranges ringing Tucson. Catalinas to the north, Santa Rita to the south, Rincon east, Tucson west. The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?
Chapter Twelve
Second and third runs with Irina’s husband went well. Driver’s gym bag on the closet floor under shoes and dirty clothes fattened.
Then the next run.
&
nbsp; Everything started out fine. Ducks in a row, all on track, according to plan. Target was a low-end, homegrown shop offering check cashing and payroll advances. It hunkered down at one spare end of a Sixties strip mall, next to an abandoned theater with posters for dubbed science fiction movies and foreign-made crime thrillers featuring out-of-work American actors still under glass. To the other side sat a pawn shop so erratically open it didn’t even bother to post business hours. Its real business took place through the back door. Garlic, cumin, coriander and lemon from a falafel shop aromatized the region.
They’d gone in at nine, first opening. Metal shutters got pushed up then, doors unlocked. Only hired help about, workers getting minimum wage with no incentive to hold out or really give much of a shit, boss never around till ten or after. That time of day, even if there was an alarm, you could count on police being tapped out by rush-hour traffic.
Unfortunately, cops had the pawn shop staked out and one of them, terminally bored, happened to be looking at Check-R-Cash when Standard’s crew went in. He had a thing for the tall Latina who manned the front desk.
“Well, shit.”
“Wha’s wrong, she don’ love you no more?”
He told them. “So what do we do?” Not even close to what they’d been waiting for.
DeNoux being senior officer, it was his decision. He ran a hand through bristle-cut gray hair. “You guys as tired of this detail as I am?” he asked.
Tired of eating crap? Getting broiled all day in the van? Peeing in bottles? What’s to be tired of?
“I hear you. What the fuck. Let’s hit it.”
Driver watched as the commandos burst out the van’s back doors and charged Check-R-Cash. Knowing their attention was directed forward, he eased out from behind the Dumpster. Took him but moments out of the car, motor running, to slash the van’s tires. Then he pulled up at the front of the store. Gunfire inside. Three had gone in. Two emerged to slam into the back seat as he popped the clutch, floored it, and shot out across the parking lot. One of the two who’d come out was mortally wounded.
Neither of them was Standard.
Chapter Thirteen
“You’ve had the pork and yucca, right?”
“Only about twenty times. Nice vest! New?”
“Everyone’s a comic.”
Even this early, a little before six, Gustavo’s was packed. Manny squinted as Anselmo slipped a Modelo before him. Any time he left his cave the light was too strong.
“Gracias.”
“How’s the writing gig?”
“Hey, we’re the same. Sit on our butts all day guiding things towards disaster. Car or script goes over the edge, we start again.” He threw back his beer in a couple of gulps. “Enough of that shit. Let’s have something good.” Pulling a bottle out of his backpack. “New, from Argentina. Malbec grapes.”
Anselmo materialized with wineglasses. Manny poured, slid a glass across. They both sipped.
“Am I right?” He had another taste. “Oh, yeah. I’m right.” Holding onto the glass as onto a buoy, Manny looked about. “You ever think this was what your life would come to? Not that I know fuckall about your life.”
“Not sure I ever thought much about it.”
Manny held up his wineglass, peering across the liquid’s dark surface, tilting the glass as though to bring the world to level.
“I was going to be the next great American writer. No doubt in my mind whatever. Had a shitload of stories in literary magazines. Then my first novel came out and gave credence to the Flat Earth folk—fell right off the edge of the world. Second one didn’t even have energy enough left to scream as it went over. What about you?”
“Mostly I was just trying to get from Monday to Wednesday. Get out of my attic room, get out from under, get out of town.”
“That’s a lot of getting.”
“That’s ordinary life.”
“I hate ordinary life.”
“You hate everything.”
“I take exception, sir. A gross misrepresentation. While it may be true that I possess a distaste for such offal as the American political system, Hollywood movies, New York publishing, our last half-dozen Presidents, every movie made in the last ten years excepting those of the Coen Brothers, newspapers, talk radio, American cars, the music industry, media hype, the latest hot thing—”
“Quite a catalog.”
“—for many things in life I’ve an appreciation approaching reverence. This bottle of wine, for instance. The weather in L.A. Or the food to follow.” He refilled their glasses. “You still getting steady work?”
“Mostly.”
“Good. Not a total loss, then, moviemaking. Unlike many of today’s parents, at least it provides for its own.”
“Some of them.”
True to form, the food was everything remembered and anticipated. They followed up at a nearby bar, beer for Driver, brandy for Manny. An old man who spoke little English wandered in with his battered accordion and sat playing tangos and the songs of his youth, songs of romance and of war, as patrons stood him drinks and dropped bills into his instrument case and tears ran down his cheeks.
By nine Manny’s speech was slurring.
“So much for my big night out on the town. Used to be able to do this all night long.”
“I can drive you home.”
“Of course you can.”
“Let me just put this out there,” Manny said as they pulled up on the street outside his bungalow. “I have to be in New York next week. And I don’t fly.”
“Fly? You barely crawl.”
So maybe Driver was feeling the drinks too.
“Be that as it may,” Manny went on, “I was wondering if you’d consider driving me. I’d pay top dollar.”
“Don’t see how I can. I’ve got shoots scheduled. But even if I could, no way I’d ever take your money.”
Having wrestled his way out of the car, Manny leaned back down to the window: “Just keep it in mind, okay?”
“Sure I will. Why not? Get some sleep, my friend.”
Ten blocks away, a police unit hove up in his rear view mirror. Careful to maintain speed and to signal turns well in advance, Driver pulled into a Denny’s and parked facing the street.
The cop went by. He was patrolling solo. Window rolled down, takeout cup of coffee from 7-Eleven in one hand, radio crackling.
Coffee sounded good.
Might as well have some while he was here.
Chapter Fourteen
From inside he heard the bleating of a terminally wounded saxophone. Doc had ideas about music different from most people’s.
“Been a while,” Driver said when the door opened to a nose like a bloated mushroom, soft-poached eyes.
“Seems like just yesterday,” Doc said. “Course, to me everything seems like just yesterday. When I remember it at all.”
Then he just stood there. The sax went on bleating behind him. He glanced back that way, and for a moment Driver thought he might be getting ready to yell over his shoulder for it to shut up.
“No one plays like that anymore,” Doc said with a sigh.
He looked down.
“You’re dripping on my welcome mat.”
“You don’t have a welcome mat.”
“No—but I used to. A nice one. Then people somehow started getting the notion I meant it.” That strangled sound—a laugh? “You could be the blood man, you know. Like the milk man. Making deliveries. People’d put out bottles with a list of what they need rolled up in the mouth. Half a pint of serum, two pints of whole, small container of packed cells….I don’t need any blood, blood man.”
“But I will, and a lot more besides, if you don’t let me in.”
Doc backed off, gap in the door widening. Man had been living in a garage when he and Driver first met. Here he was, still living in a garage. Bigger one, though; Driver’d give him that. Doc had spent half a lifetime dispensing marginally legal drugs to the Hollywood crowd before he got shut down and mo
ved to Arizona. Had a mansion up in the Hills, people said, so many rooms that no one, even Doc himself, ever knew who was living there. Guests wandered up stairwells during parties and didn’t show up again for days.
“Have a taste?” Doc asked, pouring from a half-gallon jug of generic bourbon.
“Why not?”
Doc handed him a half-filled water tumbler so bleary it might have been smeared with Vaseline.
“Cheers,” Driver said.
“That arm doesn’t look so good.”
“You think?”
“You want, I could have a look at it.”
“I didn’t call ahead.”
“I’ll work you in.”
Driver watched as dissembling fell away.
“Be good to be of use again.”
Doc scurried about gathering things. Some of the things he gathered and laid out in a perfect line were a little scary.
Easing Driver out of his coat, scissoring blood-soaked shirt and pasty T-shirt away, Doc whistled tunelessly, squinting.
“Eyesight’s not what it used to be.” As he reached to probe at the wound with a hemostat, his hand shook. “But then again, what is?”
He smiled.
“Takes me right back. All those muscle groups. Used to read Gray’s Anatomy obsessively when I was in high school. Lugged the damn thing around like a Bible.”
“Following in your father’s footsteps?”
“Not hardly. My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole. Spent his life selling roomfuls of furniture on credit to families he knew couldn’t afford it only so he could repossess it and go on charging them.”
Pulling the top off a bottle of Betadine, Doc dumped it into a saucepan, found a packet of cotton squares and threw them in as well. Fished one out with two fingers.
“Mother was Peruvian. How the hell they ever met’s beyond me, circles he traveled in. Back home she’d been a midwife and curandera. A healer. Important person in the community. Here, she got turned into goddam Donna Reed.”
“By him?”
“Him. Society. America. Her own expectations. Who can say?”
Doc swabbed gently at the wound.
His hands had quit shaking.
