Slipstream

by Leslie Larson

  If only he hadn’t had the two beers. Then none of the rest would have happened. Or maybe it would have, you never know. Maybe it was bound to happen, maybe it was just in his stars. One little slipup and everything goes to hell. There’s no turning back. You’re fucked.

  At least it was over now. At least he’d gone and done it so he could stop worrying about when it was going to happen. But he just couldn’t go back inside. Couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. It was no joke when you got older. And he was different now. Despite this slipup, something in him had shifted. One thing was sure, he had to drop out of sight before they caught him dirty. Leave the Morningstar, make himself scarce.

  Then he remembered the trip. Of course! Now he got it. He laughed, shook his head. It was all there, as big as life. All he had to do was take a step back, see the big picture. The plan, how every piece fit together. Wow! It all made such perfect sense. All this time he’d thought he was lost, and someone else was calling the shots.

  It was all a plant: the way he’d felt when he woke that morning, winning the contest, running into Pete, drinking the beers. Doing the crank, smoking the crack, falling off the wagon. It was all a way to get him out of there. To force him to use the winning ticket to start fresh. In Mexico. Wasn’t it a new place, with new rules? Where life was more real? With none of the bad influences he had here? Where things were cheap and he could afford a house, get a good start, get his act together?

  A flood of relief washed over him. Thankfulness. Mexico. The healing heat of the blazing sun. The amazing sparkle of the blue, blue water.

  He’d go, then. Make a break for it.

  21

  It was only when he saw the tusks rising out of the water, the massive trunk trumpeting in agony, that Rudy realized where he was. Surrounded by spires of glass and steel that rose up into the moving sky, the jagged hole of black tar breached the crust of the earth like a cavity in a molar. A memory from his childhood stirred: the mammoth family at the edge of the pond, the fountain splashing forlornly on the gray water. La Brea. Even now the name tugged at the pit of his stomach. He slowed the car, turned left, circled the block. The second time around, damned if there wasn’t a parking space. Why not? Rudy wondered. He still had the whole afternoon to kill.

  He fed the meter and zipped his jacket. The wind was picking up. He walked along the iron railing that circled the pond until he got as close as he could to the three mammoths: the biggest one submerged up to its shoulders in water, its head thrown back and mouth opened to the sky as if begging for mercy. Safe on the bank, the mother and baby mammoth watched placidly, either oblivious or unconcerned. That’s what had bothered him as a kid: the two mammoths standing dumbly by while the father thrashed, trapped by the tar. Beneath him were the bones of all the other animals who had met the same fate—dire wolves, giant sloths, sabertooth tigers, huge vultures, and tiny horses who had been sucked one by one into the oozing asphalt.

  Rudy realized now that he used to think they were real. That La Brea was a sanctuary right there on Wilshire where all the animals and land were kept exactly as they’d been since prehistoric times. That each time he passed by, the family trio was there: the father still struggling, the mother and child still grazing tranquilly nearby. Pressing his face against the iron railings, he saw L.A. as it had once been: steamy and verdant, teaming with the animals whose bones lay under the sidewalk where he stood. A sense of desolation lingered over the mass grave that had been covered, season after season, with a new layer of carnage. Even now it gave Rudy a lonely feeling, a dull awareness of peril.

  But the place was also shabby in an ordinary way, like a worn carnival ride. In the reeds near the shore smashed paper cups, plastic bags, and soft-drink containers floated. The paint on the mammoths was chipped and faded. Bare spots were worn in the grass that ringed the pond. The water itself was a lurid greenish brown, and Rudy could see bulbs of algae clinging to the mucky bottom. Streams of bubbles rose from the mud, making the surface of the pond boil. In Rudy’s mind they were the exhalations of the long-sleeping animals, sighs breathed by skeletons of bison and coyotes laid side by side in the ooze.

  When the rain peppered his back and blew in squalls across the surface of the lake, Rudy pulled his jacket tighter and turned toward the car. But as he got nearer he realized that he couldn’t face more aimless driving, and the thought of drifting haphazardly through the city filled him with such despair that he whimpered as he wiped his wet face with the palms of his hands. He wanted to sit down on the sidewalk, to cry out. More than ever he yearned for his bed, the sweet dark room where no one could see him, where all he had to do was curl up and pull the blankets around his shoulders. He should have brought a pillow, he told himself, a blanket. He could stretch out in the back seat of his car and take a nap while the rain popped comfortingly on the roof.

  Instead he headed up the slight incline to the museum itself, a low, bunkerlike building. He’d never been inside before, and he figured he could at least sit down, be out of the rain. Few people were around. Inside was a ticket counter, beyond, a gift shop. Rudy unzipped his jacket. The entrance fee was far from cheap, but he decided to splurge.

  When he held out the money, the young, fragile-looking woman at the register gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Oh, sir! What happened?”

  Rudy followed her eyes to the berry stain on his chest. It had dried to a purplish black. He looked at it a moment, then covered it with his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Once he was inside, it was hard to concentrate. There was so much: mechanical beasts that moved and roared when you pressed a button, dioramas of wolf packs and feasting vultures, vats of oil with interactive levers so you could feel what it was like to be stuck in the tar. Skeletons and skeletons and skeletons. So many bones. Rudy ran his hand over a mammoth tooth the size of a footstool. He read bits from signs that described how leaves and water disguised the surface of the tar, how animals trapped in the asphalt lured others in after them. Flocks of schoolchildren raced through the museum, shrieking like parrots. Guards in blue uniforms watched from the doorways.

  A slow ache built at the base of Rudy’s spine, like the muscle was twisting in a knot. His temples and the back of his neck throbbed. He went to a bench near a window and rested a minute, trying to pull the room into focus. He was tired, so tired. The room expanded and contracted. The ceiling was dizzyingly high. The walls lost their perpendicularity and leaned at crazy angles. For a moment it was hard to tell which way was up, and Rudy slammed his hands down on his thighs in an effort to stabilize himself. What was wrong? It could be food, he told himself. Maybe he needed to eat. The floor dipped. The room was too big. Horizons spread endlessly in all directions. If he didn’t get into a smaller space soon, Rudy felt that he would be swept into oblivion.

  Somehow he made it to the restroom. What a blessing: the light was dim. The stainless-steel doors and cool porcelain sinks calmed him. Rudy stepped into a stall and emptied his bladder. That was a relief, too. He’d been holding it all day, and that had added to his anxiety. At the sink he gave himself a stern talking-to. Everything was okay, there was no need to worry. Nothing was wrong with him. Everything was under control. He smoothed back his hair. Go out there and enjoy yourself. Take a break. Learn something. Have some fun.

  He tried to distract himself at the glass booth where men and women in white jackets worked with paintbrushes and solvents, cleaning bones. They worked with their heads down, their latex gloves and white coats stained with tar. Rudy watched them dip and clean, holding the tiny bones with tweezers, numbering them meticulously. Nearest him, a storklike man laid tiny bones on a paper towel. The sign said they were mouse teeth. Rudy tapped the glass and waved. The man nodded and went back to work. When Rudy knocked again, the man ignored him. Mouse teeth. It figured. When Rudy knocked louder, the guy got up and moved across the room. Did he think he was some kind of fancy scientist, sitting there all d
ay dipping what looked like grains of rice in turpentine? Sheesh. Rudy walked away, shaking his head.

  Rudy was about to leave when he noticed a group of schoolchildren gathered around a display on one side of the room. He edged to the front of the pack until his hands rested against the glass panel. There, at the back of a small black cave, a short human skeleton stood upright, facing Rudy as if it were ready to walk toward him.

  “I can’t see,” one of the kids said behind him.

  “Hey, fat ass!” another called. “Get out of the way!”

  Titters. Giggles. Laughter.

  Rudy didn’t turn around. The crowd of kids had a smell: bubble gum and laundry detergent. He read the placard to the side of the glass. The only human skeleton found in La Brea, though scientists didn’t think it was the tar that got her. Her. Rudy looked back at the skeleton. A young woman, the placard said, probably killed by a blow to the head. Sure enough, there it was: a star-shaped fissure in her skull, like a cracked egg. Her empty eye sockets stared at Rudy, her too-long arms dangled at her sides. She was slightly pigeon-toed, with an unsure grimace. She’d probably been killed elsewhere and thrown into the tar, the caption went on to explain. Probably murder, one of the earliest ever discovered.

  “Push the button!” one of the kids called from behind. An older boy, you could tell by his voice.

  “Push it!”

  Rudy looked down. To his right, at waist level, a girl with scrawny arms and bangs cut jaggedly across her forehead looked up at him. Her front teeth were missing. Grinning, she brought her finger up to the large black button on the wall and pushed. There was a murmur from behind him, some shuffling as the kids surged forward.

  To Rudy’s amazement, the skeleton began to change. First a faint glow surrounded it, then flesh grew on the bones in a reverse process of decay. Within seconds a squat aboriginal woman wearing a tattered brown hide stood in front of him. She had a dazed expression, as if she knew the fate that would befall her.

  “Looks like your mama!” one of the boys called out.

  “No, like yours!” another shouted. “I saw her wearing that same dress this morning!”

  There were squeals and laughter and pushing. Rudy got an elbow in the side. Floating in the glass above the woman’s head, he saw the ghostly reflection of his own face. Pale and bewildered, his mouth a small, pinched circle.

  “She was murdered!” he shouted, spinning around. “They killed her!”

  There was an immediate and complete hush. The children’s faces were uniform, each one staring at him with wide-eyed terror.

  “They bashed her head in,” Rudy said, looking at each of them in turn. “How do you like that?”

  The children’s mouths hung open. Their eyes shifted with horror from Rudy to the murder victim behind him. That sobered them up, made them think for a change. See that life wasn’t all fun and games. But too soon the spell was broken. Across the room, someone pressed the button for the moth-eaten woolly mammoth. The machine ground audibly into action, the animal’s trunk cranked jerkily into the air, and a garbled trumpet sounded across the room. A few of the kids turned and looked. Rudy looked back over his shoulder at the prehistoric woman. The ragged dress slowly disappeared, the flesh evaporated from the bones. Only the skeleton remained, stained as if it been dipped in motor oil, the joints wired clumsily together.

  “You’re sick, mister,” one of the kids said.

  That’s when Rudy noticed the guard. The same one, the same damn one who worked at the security check in the airport, the one who had pretended to be eating in the restaurant. Watching him. He should have known.

  “Watch out,” Rudy said, pushing through the crowd of kids. “All of you.”

  Outside, the rain had stopped. Rudy felt like Noah stepping off the Ark after the floodwaters had receded. All the pavements were wet; water streamed down the gutters, the wide lawn was churned up and muddy. The little fountain still sputtered and the three mammoths stayed frozen in place.

  He walked a ways to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He was a little hungry. There was a phone booth not far from his car. He knew better than to call from home or any other place where the calls could be traced, and this place was as good as any. He’d taken the quarters from the jelly jar that Inez kept for the laundromat. All the information he needed was on the scraps of paper he kept in his pockets. It hadn’t been hard to find the numbers and addresses. To get warmed up, he ordered a pizza for Glenn Waller in his office, then sent the Roto-Rooter truck to his house once he got home that evening. He scheduled a cabinet refacer to come out on the weekend for an estimate. Sanjay Srinivasa was in the book: Rudy left his name and number with several businesses, including an escort service and an adult bookstore. Then there was his staff: Latasha, Imogene, Maria. He called Waller a few times and hung up when he answered, then tried Srinivasa, but he wasn’t there.

  By the time he got to the trickier calls, his quarters were getting low. Some idiot put him on hold. While he waited, Rudy glanced around at the new subdivision of townhouses that was going up right there within sight of the tar pits. New concrete walkways split off from the sidewalk and led to the doors of beige and green buildings, which were piled like a jumble of rectangles on top of each other. THREE BEDROOMS/TWO BATHS the sign in the front said. ATTACHED TWO-CAR GARAGE. Once things got straightened out, maybe he would buy a place there. An all-new townhouse, right in the middle of things. Inez would like that: she and Vanessa could walk to the fancy stores, could spend an afternoon at the art museum. He wondered if beneath the courtyards and patios there were layers and layers of bones like he’d seen in the photos inside the museum. In his own yard at home, the only artifacts he’d found were a perfectly clear marble and a green army soldier. But who knew? There might be pebble choppers and shards of pottery, maybe even skeletons of prehistoric people like the one inside. The lawns around the townhouses were just coming in, sprouting tiny blades of grass like down on a newborn’s head. They’d installed a sprinkler system at the edge of the sidewalk. The spigot nearest the phone booth floated in a glistening pool of black tar.

  “I assure you that this is no joke!” Rudy said when he was finally taken off hold. People were so incompetent! “That’s right,” he said after listening a moment. “That’s correct.” A heavy truck passed, making it hard to hear. Rudy plugged one ear. “Well, how about this? When this whole thing is reported in the papers tomorrow, I’d hate to be the one who thought it was a joke. If I was you, I’d take it serious. Very serious.”

  He slammed down the phone.

  God, he was tired. Hungry, too. He really should eat something healthy. Vegetables, or something hot. An apple maybe, but only sweet things sounded good to him. His feet hurt as he headed back to his car. The ache in his lower back had spread up to his shoulders and down to his hips. What if he just went home and told Inez what had happened? He closed his eyes a moment, imagined her arms around his neck, her whispering that everything was going to be all right. But then he remembered the look on Waller’s face earlier that day, how the kids inside the museum had taunted him just a few moments ago. Even Inez couldn’t be trusted, especially the way she’d been behaving lately. So watchful, so distant. And if she found out he’d lost his job…There was no need for her to know. Things were going to change soon, anyway.

  His car looked cleaner after the rain. If he absolutely had to, he could always live in it, at least for a while. The sky was clearing. When he opened the car door, a wall of warm air hit him pleasantly in the face. The wrappers and napkins that littered the backseat and floor of the car scented it with a sugary fragrance, like a bakery. He slipped behind the steering wheel and took a box of six miniature doughnuts from the console between the seats. Only $1.49 at the Sunbeam day-old.

  It was so nice to relax a minute. The sun coming through the windshield warmed him like a soft blanket. He took his time with the doughnuts, enjoying the powdered sugar on the outside, the way the whole thing melted to a velvety ma
sh as he chewed. They were small; it was easy to eat all six. He tossed the box on the floor with the rest of the stuff: the newspapers he read to kill time, the crumpled napkins, packets of catsup, and crushed soft-drink cans. Too bad he didn’t have any milk.

  Did any of the animals manage to escape the tar once they were stuck? Pull themselves loose and live another day, thinking what a close call it had been? Rudy didn’t know, but it certainly seemed possible. He started the engine. Even though it was warm and stuffy inside the car, he kept the windows up so he could enjoy the safe, toasty feeling. If he drove slowly, staying on surface roads with all their red lights, it wouldn’t be too early to head home.

  Home.

  As he pulled into traffic, he thought of the woman with the bashed skull. The eyes of the wolves glowing at night. The flapping of gigantic wings. All on the same streets where legions of people now pushed their shopping carts full of their earthly belongings, where they slept in doorways and ranted to themselves, the contents of their minds spilling out into the open like stuffing from a dirty mattress. Lining up at church basements for their dinners. Hanging out all day long on the sidewalks, their empty hands extended. Groundless. At sea. Ships without anchors.

  Not him. Rudy was going home. He pictured everything in the small square house. The chairs and furniture. The table in the kitchen, set with place mats, glasses, silverware. Food. He had a wife and daughter. A bed with sheets, blankets, and pillows. He had a bathtub, a garage, a refrigerator.

  He would do anything, anything, to keep them.

  22

  Inez turned the burner off under Vanessa’s cauliflower when she heard Rudy’s car door slam. She drained the vegetable in the sink and sprinkled on the cheese she’d grated.