Drive

by James Sallis

  “This round’s on me,” Doc told him. Benny took away the highball glass and set a shot glass before him, poured. Doc’s hand was steady as he lifted it.

  “Same?” Benny asked the kid.

  “Whatever you want,” Doc said.

  “Bud’s good.”

  Benny brought him a can. Doc bumped his empty shot glass against it and the kid drank.

  “So…You living up this way now?”

  Doc nodded.

  “Doing what?”

  “Retired.”

  “Man, you were retired when I first met you.”

  Shrugging, Doc signaled for a drink. Got a little extra in this one, since it was the end of a bottle. It reminded Doc of Sterno. Once as a kid he’d gone out behind the house, into the wilds of pecan trees and hedges and, following a night zipped into an army-surplus unsleeping bag, had attempted to fry bacon over a Sterno can, managing only to cook his thumb.

  “Thing is, I have this sweet deal.”

  Of course he did. Guys like this, came up to you at a bar, knew you or claimed to, they always had a sweet deal, wanted to tell you about it.

  “Not following in your brother’s footsteps, I hope.”

  “Hey, you know how it is. Some families turn out doctors, some produce lawyers….”

  The kid took off his shoe, pulled back the insole and fished out two hundred-dollar bills, which he laid on the bar. Part of the stash he’d use to make bail, as proof against vagrancy charges, for bribes, or just to get by—an old convict’s habit.

  Doc glanced at the bills.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Eric. Eric Guzman. Think of that as on-call pay.”

  “You expecting to need medical care soon?”

  “Nah, not me. I’m careful. Plan ahead.”

  What the hell, maybe this kid’s whole life was a non sequitur. Beer couldn’t have hit him that hard. Not Bud, and not in the couple hours he’d been sucking at it. Doc looked up and saw the kid’s pinpoint pupils. Okay. Now it makes sense.

  “Planning ahead’s what I’m doing. Something does happen, I’ll know where to come, right?”

  Kid didn’t know shit. None of them did these days. Fancied themselves outlaws, every one of them. Up in society’s face, down for anything that went counter.

  Doc suffered another half-hour of Eric Guzman before making excuses and hauling his own sorry ass off the barstool and back home. Long enough for Guzman to tell him about his sweet deal. They were taking out an electronics store on Central, but way out at city’s edge where the street kind of petered out, with mainly warehouses and the like around. Place was having a blow-out weekend sale, and Guzman figured by Sunday there was going to be one hell of a pile of money on hand. Security guards were all about a hundred and ten. Had his crew together, all they needed now was a driver.

  Miss Dickinson was waiting for Doc, complaining, when he came up the driveway. She’d wandered in his door a year or so back when he’d had it open late one afternoon, and he’d been feeding her ever since. A mixed breed in which Russian Blue was most evident, she was missing half her left ear and two toes on the left front foot.

  “How many meals is this today, Miss D?” he asked. There was a troubling regularity to her visits; he suspected she made rounds from house to house all over the neighborhood. But he opened a can of albacore tuna and set it in a corner where she could get to it and didn’t have to chase it all about the room, though she would anyway, long after it was empty.

  He hadn’t cleaned up from the night before. Strips of blood-soaked cloth, four-by-fours, bowls of peroxide and Betadine. Bleach, stainless steel sewing needles, bottles of alcohol.

  Good to be useful again.

  Before he finished the clean-up, Miss Dickinson downed the tuna and came over to see what he was doing, wrinkling her nose at bleach and cleansers, steering wide of peroxide and Betadine, but showing great interest in blood-soaked cloth, cotton and gauze. She kept trying to paw these out of the serving bowls and plastic bins into which he’d tossed them.

  His new patient was coming back for a check-up on Friday. Worried about infection, Doc had told him. Now he was wondering if infection was the lesser danger. He should warn his patient about Eric Guzman.

  Chapter Eighteen

  For a long time after Standard’s death he didn’t take on any more jobs. Not that he wasn’t approached. Word gets around. He watched a lot of TV with Benicio, cooked huge meals for and with Irina. “Learned out of self defense,” he’d said when she asked how he’d found his way to cooking. Then, as he grated fresh Parmesan, Italian sausages laid out on the cutting board to warm, he told her about his mother. They clicked glasses. A good, inexpensive sauvignon blanc.

  Day or two a week, he’d go off to the studio, give them what they wanted, be back before Benicio got home from school. The checks Jimmie sent him each month grew. He could go on like this forever. Nothing gold can stay—he remembered that from a poem he’d read back in high school.

  Not that in L.A. you could easily tell without consulting a calendar, but fall had arrived. Nights were cool and breezy. Each evening, light flattened itself against the horizon trying heroically to hold on, then was gone.

  Home from her new job as ward clerk at the local ER, Irina refilled their wineglasses.

  “Here’s to—”

  He remembered the glass falling, shattering as it struck the floor.

  He remembered the starburst of blood on her forehead, the snail of it down her cheek as she tried to spit out what was in there in the moment before she collapsed.

  He remembered catching her as she fell—and then, for a long time, not much else.

  Gang business, the police would tell him later. Some sort of territorial dispute, we think.

  Irina died just after four a.m.

  999

  Driver having no legal rights, Benicio got shipped off to grandparents in Mexico City. For a year or more he’d write the boy every week, and Benicio would send back drawings. He’d put them up on the refrigerator of whatever apartment he was living in, if it had a refrigerator. For a while there he kept on the hop, moving cribs every month or two, old Hollywood to Echo Park to Silverlake, thinking that might help. Time went by, which is what time does, what it is. Then one day it came to him how long it had been since he’d heard from the boy. He tried calling, but the number was out of service.

  Hating to be alone, to face empty apartments and the day’s gapping hours, Driver kept busy. Took everything that came his way and went looking for more. Even had a speaking part in one movie when, half an hour into the shoot, a bit player grew ill.

  The director ran it down for him.

  “You pull in and this guy’s standing there. You shake your head, like you’re feeling sorry for him, this poor sonofabitch, and you get out of the car, leaning back against the door. ‘Your call,’ you tell him. Got it?”

  Driver nodded.

  “That just goddamn dripped with menace,” the director said later when they broke for lunch. “Two words—just two fucking words! It was beautiful. You should think seriously about doing more.”

  He did, but not the way the director meant.

  Standard used to hang out a lot at a bar called Buffalo Diner just off Broadway in downtown L.A. Food hadn’t been served there since Nixon’s reign, but the name survived, as did, in patches, the chalk in which the last menu had been put up on a blackboard above the bar. So Driver started being there afternoons. Strike up conversations, stand a few drinks, mention he was a friend of Standard’s, ask if they knew anyone looking for a first-rate driver. By the second week he’d become a regular, knew the rest of them by name, and had more work than he could handle.

  Meanwhile, as he began turning down shoots, and went on turning them down, offers declined.

  “What am I supposed to tell these people?” Jimmie said the first few times.

  Within weeks he shifted to: “They want the best. That’s what they keep telling me.” Even the I
talian guy with all the forehead creases and warts had been calling, he said—in person, not just through some secretary or handler. In goddamn person.

  “Look,” Jimmie’s penultimate message said. By this time Driver had stopped answering the phone. “I have to figure you’re alive but I’m starting not to give half a goddamn, if you know what I mean. What I’m telling people is I seem to have acquired a second asshole.”

  His last message said: “Been fun, kid, but I just lost your number.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  From a phone booth Driver called the number on the coupons. The phone rang and rang at the other end—after all, it was still early. Whoever finally answered was adamant, as adamant as one could be in dodgy English, that Nino’s was not open and please he would have to call back after eleven please.

  “I could do that,” Driver said, “but it’s possible your boss won’t be happy when he finds you’ve kept him waiting.”

  Too big a mouthful, apparently.

  “It’s also possible that you could pass me along to someone whose English is a tad better.”

  A homeless man went by on the street outside pushing a shopping cart piled high. Driver thought again of Sammy and his mule cart laden with things no one wanted.

  A new voice came on. “Can I be of service, sir?”

  “I hope so. Seems I find myself in possession of something that’s not mine.”

  “And that would be…?”

  “Close to a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Please hold, sir.”

  Within moments a heavy, chesty voice came on the line.

  “Nino here. Who the fuck’s there. Dino says you have something of mine?”

  Nino and Dino? “So I have reason to believe.”

  “Yeah, well, lots of people have stuff of mine. I got a lot of stuff. What was your name again?”

  “I’d just as soon keep it. I’ve had it a long time.”

  “Why the hell not? I don’t need no more names either.” He turned away. “I’m on the fuckin’ phone here, you can’t see that?” Then back: “So what’s the deal?”

  “Recently I had some business with a man from out your way driving a Crown Vic.”

  “It’s a popular car.”

  “It is. What I wanted to let you know is that he won’t be doing any more business. Nor will Strong and Blanche. Or two gentlemen who checked out for the last time, though it wasn’t their room, at a Motel 6 north of Phoenix.”

  “Phoenix is a hard town.”

  Driver could hear the man breathing there at the end of the line.

  “What are you, some kind of fuckin’ army?”

  “I drive. That’s what I do. All I do.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ve gotta tell you, it’s sounding to me like sometimes you give a little extra value for the money, if you know what I mean.”

  “We’re professionals. People make deals, they need to stick to them. That’s the way it works, if it’s going to work at all.”

  “My old man used to say the same thing.”

  “I haven’t counted, but Blanche told me there’s something over two hundred grand in the bag.”

  “There damn well better be. And you’re telling me this because?”

  “Because it’s your money and your bag. Say the word, both can be at your door within the hour.”

  Driver heard something fizzy and sinuous, Sinatra maybe, playing in the background.

  “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

  “At what I do, I’m the best. This isn’t what I do.”

  “I can go with that. So what do you get out of it?”

  “Just that: out of it. Once the money’s in your hands, we’re even. You forget Cook and his Crown Vic, forget the goons at that Motel 6, forget we’ve ever had this conversation. No one steps up to me a week from now, or a month from now, with your regards.”

  Silence beat its way down the line. Music started up again at the far end.

  “What if I refuse?” Nino said.

  “Why would you? You have nothing to lose and a quarter of a million to gain.”

  “Good point.”

  “We have a deal, then?”

  “We have a deal. Within the hour…?”

  “Right. Just remember what your old man said.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Doc threw sponges, swabs, syringes and gloves into a plastic bucket produced to fit against floorboards and serve as a wastebasket for cars. Hey, he lived in a garage, right? Lived on an island, he’d use coconut shells. No problem.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Stitches are out, the wound looks good.”

  Bad news was that his patient wasn’t going to have a whole lot of feeling in that arm from now on.

  Good news was, he had full mobility.

  Driver handed over a wad of bills secured with a rubber band.

  “Here’s what I figure I owe you. That’s not enough—”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “Not the first time you stapled my ass back together, after all.”

  “1950 Ford, wasn’t it?”

  “Like the one Mitchum drove in Thunder Road, yeah.”

  That was really a ’51—you could tell by the V-8 emblems, Ford Custom on front fenders, dashboard and steering wheel—but chrome windsplits had been removed and a ’50 grille added. Close enough.

  “You crashed into the supports of the freeway approach that had just gone up.”

  “Forgot it was there. It hadn’t been, the last few times I made that run.”

  “Perfectly understandable.”

  “Something wonky about the car, too.”

  “Might cause a man to take caution who he steals a car from.”

  “Borrows a car from. I was going to take it back…. Seriously, Doc: You had my back then and you have it now. Appreciate the heads-up on Guzman. I saw the news. All three of them went down at the scene.”

  “Figures. He was basically your purest brand of trouble.”

  “Not many that’d crew up with a one-armed driver. I was desperate, I’d have taken on just about anything at that point. You knew that.”

  But Doc had drifted off into his own world, as he did sometimes, and made no response.

  Miss Dickinson rushed up, front legs stiff and hitting ground together, then the back, like a rocking horse, as Driver was leaving. Doc had told him about her. He let her in and closed the door. Last he saw, she was sitting quietly at Doc’s feet, waiting.

  Doc was thinking about a story he’d read by Theodore Sturgeon. This guy, not playing with a full deck, lives in a garage apartment like his. He’s brutish, elemental; much of life escapes him. But he can fix anything. One day he finds a woman in the street. She’s been beaten, all but killed. He takes her back to the apartment and—Sturgeon goes into great detail about provisions for blood drainage, makeshift surgical instruments, the moment-to-moment practicalities—repairs her.

  What was it called?

  “Bright Segment”—that’s it.

  If in our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we’re fortunate. Most don’t.

  And the rest wasn’t silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said.

  The rest was just noise.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Best job Driver ever had was a remake of Thunder Road. Hell, two-thirds of the movie was driving. That ’56 Chevy, with Driver inside, was the real star.

  The production was one of those things that just fell together out of nowhere, two guys sitting in a bar talking favorite movies. They were brothers, and had had a couple of minor money-makers aimed at the teen market. Both pretty much geeks, but good enough guys. The older one, George, was the front man, took care of the production end, finding money, all that. His younger brother, Junie, did most of the directing. They wrote the films together during all-nighters at various Denny’s in central L.A.

  They’d been running scenes and lines from Thunder Road for three or four minutes when the
y both got quiet at the same time.

  “We could do it,” George said.

  “We could for damn sure try.”

  By the next day’s end, with nothing on paper, no treatment, not a single word of script, nary a spreadsheet or projection in sight, they had it together. Contingent commitments from investors, a distributor, the whole nine yards. Their lawyer was looking into rights and permissions.

  What tipped it was, they approached the hottest young actor of the year, who turned out to be a huge fan of Robert Mitchum. “Man I wanted to be Bob Mitchum!” he said, and signed on. Driver had worked on the movie that made him a star. He was a little shit even then and hadn’t got any better. Lasted another year or two before he dropped off the face of the earth. You’d hear about him from time to time in the tabloids after that. He’d gone into rehab again, he was poised for a comeback, he was set for a guest spot on some lame sitcom. But right then he was hot property, and with him on board, everything else fell into place.

  What a lot of people don’t know about the original is how that Ford used in the crash scene had to be specially built. They put on cast-steel front bumpers, heavily reinforced the body and frame, modified the engine for maximum horsepower, then realized that no regular tires could handle the weight and speed and had to have those specially made as well, of solid sponge rubber. All the moonshiner cars in the movie were real. They’d been employed by moonshiners in the Asheville, North Carolina, area who sold them to the film company then used the money to buy newer, faster cars.

  Driver was principal on the film, with a young guy out of Gary, Indiana, Gordon Ligocki, doing most of the rest. He had a duck’s ass right out of the Fifties, wore an I.D. bracelet that had Your Name engraved on it, and spoke so softly you had to ask him to repeat half of what he said.

  “( ),” he said that first day as they took a lunch break.

  “Sorry?” Driver said.

  “Said you drive well.”

  “You too.”

  They sat quietly. Ligocki was tossing back cans of Coke. As Driver ate his sandwiches and fruit and sipped coffee, he was thinking how if he did that, he’d be calling time out halfway through every stunt to pee.