by James Sallis
And now, from a phone booth outside the mom-and-pop convenience store, just as he did that long-ago night, he calls Manny. Half an hour later they’re walking by the sea out Santa Monica way, a stone’s throw from Warszawa.
“Back when we first met,” Driver said, “and I was just a kid—”
“Looked in a mirror lately? You’re still just a fuckin’ kid.”
“—I told you how I was at peace, how it scared me. You remember that?”
A museum of American culture in miniature, a disemboweled time capsule—burger and taco sacks, soda and beer cans, tied-off condoms, magazine pages, articles of clothing—washed up on shore with each thrust of the waves.
“I remember. What you’ll find out is, only the lucky ones are able to forget.”
“Sounds heavy.”
“Line from a script I’m working on.”
Neither spoke for a while then. They walked along the beach, this whole other demotic, bustling life, one they’d never know or be a part of, encircling them. Skaters, muscle men and mimes, armies of carefree young variably pierced and tattooed, beautiful women. Manny’s latest project was about the Holocaust and he was thinking of Paul Celan: There was earth inside them, and they dug. These people seemed somehow to have dug free.
“I told you my story about Borges and Don Quixote,” he said to Driver. “Borges is writing about that great sense of adventure, of the Don’s riding out to save the world—”
“Even if it’s only a few windmills.”
“—and some pigs.
“Then he says: ‘The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.’”
They’d come back around, to the parking lot. Manny walked to a forest-green Porsche and unlocked it.
“You’ve got a Porsche?” Driver said. Christ, he didn’t even think Manny drove. Way he lived, way he dressed. Asking if Driver could take him to New York.
“Why’d you call, boy? What did you want from me?”
“The company of a friend, I think.”
“Always a cheap treat.”
“And to tell you—”
“That you’re Borges.” Manny laughed. “Of course you are, you dumb shit. That’s the whole point.”
“Yes. But now I understand.”
Chapter Thirty-four
The carpet store was doing good business.
Not that Warszawa was exactly slouching.
It was a typical 1920s bungalow, Craftsman probably, rooms opening into one another with no halls. Hardwood floors, large, double-hung windows. Three rooms had become dining areas. The largest was divided by a half-wall. In the next, French doors opened onto a brick walkway planted with morning glories. In the third, smallest room a family party was underway. Squarish people looking much alike kept arriving with stacks of wrapped packages.
Lace curtains framed open windows. No air conditioning or need for same here so close to water’s edge.
Bernie Rose sat at a corner table in the second room by the French doors with three-quarters of a bottle and half a glass of wine before him. The older man rose as Driver approached and put out a hand. They shook.
Dark suit, gray dress shirt with cufflinks buttoned to the top, no tie.
“Care for a glass, to start with?” Rose said as they sat. “Or would you prefer your usual scotch?”
“Wine’s good.”
“Actually, it is. Amazing what’s out there these days. Chilean, Australian. This one’s from one of the new Northwest vineyards.”
Bernie Rose poured. They clinked glasses.
“Thanks for coming.”
Driver nodded. An attractive older woman wearing a black miniskirt, silver jewelry and no stockings emerged from the kitchen and began moving table to table. Strains of Spanish that leaked through the kitchen door behind her caught a foothold. Driver still heard them as his companion went on.
“The owner,” Bernie Rose said. “Never have known her name, though I’ve been coming here close to twenty years. Maybe she doesn’t look quite as good in the outfit as she did back then, but….”
What she looked, Driver thought, was completely comfortable with herself, a quality uncommon enough anywhere, and one so remarkable in trendy, self-reinventive L.A., as to appear truly subversive.
“I can recommend the duck. Hell, I can recommend everything. Hunter’s stew with homemade sausage, red cabbage, onions and beef. Pierogi, stuffed cabbage, beef roulades, potato pancakes. And the best borscht in town—served cold when it’s hot outside, hot when a chill comes on. But the duck’s to die for.”
“Duck,” Bernie Rose said when a college-age waitress with varicose veins, Valerie, came to the table, “and another of these.”
“The Cabernet-Merlot blend, right?”
“You got it.”
“Duck,” Driver echoed. Had he ever in his life eaten duck?
Further squarish people with square wrapped packages arrived to be ushered into the third room. How were they packing them all in? The owner came by in her black miniskirt to hope they had a good meal and to ask if they’d please let her know personally should there be anything else they needed, anything she could do for them.
Bernie Rose replenished glasses.
“You’ve been on a roll, boy,” he said. “Cut yourself quite a swath out there.”
“I never asked for any of it.”
“We usually don’t. But it comes down on our heads regardless. Thing that matters is what you do with it.” Looking off at the other diners, he sipped his wine. “Their lives are a mystery to me, you know. Absolutely impenetrable.”
Driver nodded.
“Izzy and I’ve been together since before I can remember. Grew up together.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Tasting the duck, he wasn’t.
They knoshed down, dipped into the frosty pitcher of lemon-studded tea Valerie had set alongside.
“So where do you go from here?” Bernie Rose said.
“Hard to say. Back to my old life, maybe. If I haven’t burned far too many bridges for that. You?”
He shrugged. “Back east, I’m thinking. Never much liked it out here anyway.”
“Friend of mine claims the story of America is all about the advancing frontier. Push through to the end of it, he says, which is what we’ve done here at land’s end, there’s nothing left, the worm starts eating its own tail.”
“Should have had the duck instead.”
Despite himself, Driver laughed.
Working their way through a second bottle of Cabernet-Merlot and the second inning of this expansive meal, ordinary life going on about them, they’d landed for the moment on a kind of island where they might pretend to be a part of it.
“Think we choose our lives?” Bernie Rose said as they cruised into coffee and cognac.
“No. But I don’t think they’re thrust upon us, either. What it feels like to me is, they’re forever seeping up under our feet.”
Bernie Rose nodded. “First time I heard about you, word was that you drove, that’s all you did.”
“True at the time. Times change.”
“Even if we don’t.”
Valerie brought the check, which Bernie Rose insisted upon paying. They walked out onto the parking lot. Stars bright in the sky. The carpet store was closing, families packing themselves into a fleet of battered trucks, decrepit Chevys, rip-off Hondas.
“Where’s your ride?”
“Over here,” Driver said. At the back edge of the lot, half hidden by a fenced area for garbage. Of course. “You don’t think we change, then.”
“Change? No. What we do is adapt. Get by. 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. That’s your ride?”
A Nineties Datsun, much battered and devoid of a number of parts such as bumpers and door handles, piebald with rustoleum and filler.
“I know, it doesn’t look like much. But
then, neither do we. A friend of mine specializes in redoing these. Good cars to start with. When he finishes with them, they scream.”
“Another driver?”
“Used to be, till both hips got shattered in a crash. That’s when he started tearing them down, building them back up.”
The parking lot was empty now.
Bernie Rose stuck out his hand. “Guess we won’t be seeing one another again. Take care, boy.”
Reaching to shake, Driver saw the knife—caught the flash of moonlight on it, actually—as Bernie Rose brought it out, left-handed, in a low arc.
He drove his knee hard against Bernie Rose’s arm, caught his wrist as it shot up, and sank the knife into his throat. He’d struck a bit central, away from the carotids and other major vessels, so it took a while, but he’d taken out the pharynx and breached the trachea, through which Bernie Rose’s last breaths whistled. So not too long.
Looking into Bernie Rose’s failing eyes, he thought: This is what people mean when they use words like grace.
He drove the rest of the way down to the pier, bore Bernie’s body to the edge of water and released it. From water we come. To water we return. The tide was going out. It lifted the body, carried it ever so gently away. City lights spackled the water.
Afterwards Driver sat feeling the fine roar and throb of the Datsun around him.
He drove. That was what he did. What he’d always do.
Letting out the clutch, he pulled from beach parking onto the street, reentering the world here at its very edge, engine a purr beneath him, yellow moon above, hundreds upon hundreds of miles to go.
Far from the end for Driver, this. In years to come, years before he went down at three a.m. on a clear, cool morning in a Tijuana bar, years before Manny Gilden turned his life into a movie, there’d be other killings, other bodies.
Bernie Rose was the only one he ever mourned.
