by James Sallis
“Clothing, laptop, sandwich, Cracker Jacks,” he said, hauling a duffel bag to the countertop. “And…” snagging these from a nail in the wall, “keys. Place is a little out of the way, off the beaten path. But cozy. Or so I hear.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Don’t see Felix do many solids like this. Marine?”
“Something like that.”
“Had to be. Back to my homework, then. Phone’s in there. It’s safe. Felix says call him.”
The woman had finished with her burger. Justin looked at the puddle on the floor and shook his head as he settled in at his post.
Back early on, back before the house, before the job, before Paul West, he had a fascination for malls. In ways he never understood, they drew him. Bright colors, lush displays in windows, the sense and sound of all those bodies moving separately and together, music, the cries of children, friendly banter. Malls were a country in miniature. He visited them, stepped into them, as though just off the ship. As though if only he sat in them long enough, put in enough miles along those arcades and scuffed floors, ate enough food court specials, something-some understanding, some sense of belonging-might solidify around him.
It was a pull he still felt when he met Elsa-at this very mall, in fact. They came back regularly. And sitting here one day, could even be the same table, he’d spoken to her about it, wondering why he kept returning.
Elsa had looked at him in that quiet way she had. “You really don’t know, do you?” Eyes went up as a pigeon took wing from the struts above their heads and sailed off toward the domed roof. Did it think that was sky? “It’s homework, Paul. Anthropology. You’re learning how to fake it.”
And he still must be-since here he was again.
He thought back to how he’d sit and eavesdrop, matching voice and cadence to appearance, this one a business woman, this one a hands-on worker, that one a teacher, moving about the scraps of sentences he overheard till a story suggested itself, the story of their lives.
To his left now sat a couple not much older than himself, man in black jeans slick at the knee, dress shirt with tail out and sleeves rolled, woman wearing loose slacks that fell to her calf, light print blouse. The man shook his head and smiled for the fifth or sixth time.
“Well, let’s see, Doris. The politicians we elected are mostly rich, members of elitist societies of one kind or another, and subject to pressure groups that have nothing to do with us and everything to do with self-preservation. The companies that process our food keep on putting in more and more additives that cause heart attacks, rampant obesity, and cancer. Meanwhile, seventy percent of American viewers last night were tuned in to find out which hunk The Bachelorette would choose once she stopped crying, wiping off her mascara and spouting homilies on camera. There ’s your great country. That ’s why I have so much hope for us.”
From a table occupied by two older women he heard: “Your problem, Anne, is you have to believe. That’s what comes first, belief-then everything else.”
And from another: “I realized just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I can’t still write him, so I started doing that. Sat down at the computer and before I knew it I’d filled eight pages. Told him what was going on, explained things, brought him up to date with my life.”
Crickets outnumbered roaches a hundred to one at the new place. He’d been sitting out back near dark when they began emerging, and soon the patio, such as it was, swarmed with them, tiny ones no larger than horseflies, others maybe a half-inch. The smallest scuttled about only to fall into cracks in the cement that must be like deep trenches for them.
Crickets and cracks went a ways toward describing the new place. Water pipes barely beneath the ground, with water coming out of the cold tap lukewarm. Any available edge-roof, foundation, window, interior wall-crumbling. A wilderness of oleanders out back, their roots no doubt well along to claiming the house’s sewer lines, so that you might expect them to come whipping out of the sink drain like tentacles any day now. Meanwhile, from the sound, about a hundred dove lived back in there somewhere.
His driver on the way to the mall hadn’t glanced up at the rearview mirror a single time. Odd, since most cabbies learned to keep a subtle watch. Man didn’t seem to have much use for mirrors period. There was a gaping wound where the driver’s side mirror used to be, and glass had gone MIA from the one on the right.
Manny had thought cabs were hysterical when he called.
“Hey, that’s funny! Guy I never knew to so much as climb in a car anyone else was driving, now he’s taking cabs.”
It had been a while since they talked. Manny knew about his recent life, went unsurprised at the sudden change.
“It is what it is-whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. You notice how that line’s in every damn script for the last two years? Just hunkered down in there, like a bad spot in a potato.”
Manny thanked him for calling and taking him away from the shit projects on his desk.
“You hear that? Write this crap long enough, you can’t think anymore, just plug in a few familiar words, what the hell, they’ll do. ‘On my desk’ my fat hairy ass. Haven’t had a desk since I was in college.”
He was working, he said, on two things. “One’s a piece of sausage. Some rich hardware dude out in the Valley who always wanted to make movies, figures vampires had their day, then zombies, next big thing has to be mermaids and-men. You’d be surprised how well Joseph Conrad adapts. I’m throwing in Little Nell for good measure. Other one’s a fine piece of cod for some pale Norwegian type who wants to show us what America’s all about.”
Another incoming call sounded on Manny’s line. He was gone seven seconds, tops. “Told ’em to fuck off. So you’re telling me you just walked away?”
“You got it. House. Car. That life.”
“What now?”
“Who knows. I’m in the wind. See where it takes me, I guess.”
“Has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? Been here before. Nietzsche’s eternal return and all that shit.” The call alert sounded again. This time, Manny ignored it. “You could come on back out here. Fresh out of fatted calves, but I’d gladly buy you a plate of pork and yucca.”
“And I’ll do that. Soon. But for now-”
“Yeah, sure. Just be careful. Things may not be as easy as they used to be. Some of it comes back, some doesn’t.”
Driver looked around. His couples were gone. A younger crowd seemed to be moving in now, wagging their iPods and cellphones behind them, fatally connected.
Why had he called Manny in the first place? We talk up our problems to others, odds are high we’re doing it either to reassure ourselves that what we’re doing is right or to talk ourselves into doing something we know is stupid.
Yeah, he thought-that about covers it.
Wondering about motivations, why he or anybody else did what they did, was something he did his best to steer clear of. How the hell could you ever know? Act, when it was called for. Otherwise, hang back.
And the next act here, for him, had to be wheels.
There was, of course, a huge parking lot filled with cars just outside, any one of which could be his. And he wouldn’t hesitate, if it became necessary.
But for now it wasn’t.
I should have figured this out a long time ago, Bill thought. Life could have been a hell of a lot simpler. Now he could say and do as he pleased. The manners he’d been raised with; that sensitivity stuff he’d later had to learn, having to put up with other people’s shit whether he wanted to or not-all of it was out the door, down the block and gone.
Now he could just stare at Wendell when he asked if Bill would be wanting to go out and sit with the others, watch some TV, play cards, they’d like that. Didn’t have to react at all if he didn’t want to. They’d put it down like everything else to Mr. Bill’s not quite with us today. The Alzheimer’s or whatever it was they thought he had.
In a way they were right. The world out there, the one
they lived in, was just pills and bad food and waiting. It smelled bad. But the world he carried around with him, that one was rich with people he’d known, places he’d been, things he’d done. The pictures there still moved.
Thing is, he liked Wendell. And he wondered if maybe Wendell knew what was going on with him. Sometimes when Bill sat there not responding, Wendell would look him in the eye and grin. Like a month back, something like that, when the “weekly entertainment” was a folk singer. Bill hated the fucking sixties, and here it was, standing in front of him. Long hair, tie-dye shirt, a smile that made you want to knock him silly. Sillier than he already was. Laughing at his own jokes. Pretending to flirt with the old women in the front row.
The guy’s first song started ‘My life is a river,’ Bill thinking the hell it is, my life’s like my head, nothing but dry fallen leaves in there. It’s not over, Eli said again and again, his oldest friend and the only one besides Billie who visited him. But it was, or well nigh.
He’d looked over and seen Wendell watching him.
Still, last night had been, by their standards, huge. Roommate Bobby’s daughter had smuggled in Bobby’s favorite, Girl Scout cookies and a pint of Early Times bourbon. It wasn’t in the rule book, but they weren’t supposed to have alcohol here. The list of reasons went on and on: confusion, dehydration, medication interactions, livers already sorely abused. Bill and Bobby finished the cookies in short order, drew out the bourbon, one sip at a time.
Now Bill sat watching the garbage truck start-and-stop down the street outside. Liquid poured out its backside. Looked like a giant snail, extruding a track of slime behind as it moved slowly along.
Three hours till lunch.
The car came off a lot hanging on to the edge of Tempe by its toenails. He’d been buzzed by two salesmen, one twentyish and enthusiastic, all but bouncing on his toes, the other with something of the crocodile about him, ageless, enduring, who dropped away as he moved ever deeper into the used section. What you want is a ride that doesn’t show its colors, one that never growls, just snaps. As he came back the second time to a Ford Fairlane, a young tire kicker in fatigues and baseball cap hollered over at him: “Hey, zero to sixty, with that one you might wanna take a book along, read while you wait, you know what I’m saying?”
He popped the hood again. Moments later a pair of well worn khaki trousers came into view. The crocodile. He waited till Driver straightened, then smiled. “I’m afraid someone’s been under the hood there, kinda messed it up some.”
Driver had the hood back down and was counting out money before he finished his sentence.
Someone had been under there all right, someone who knew what he was doing. And what that someone had started, Driver finished up in a garage at the butt end of Van Buren.
Half a century ago the main drag for Phoenix and a watering hole for those travelling U.S. Highways 70, 80 and 89, Van Buren was now a dusty long drawl of swayback motels, streetwalkers, abandoned storefronts and vacant lots overgrown with rubbish, the very image of everything used up, worn out, cast off. The city had moved on and left this dry husk behind.
Boyd’s Garage hadn’t fared a lot better, but it had held on-since 1948, according to the sign whose ancient letters and numbers had been recently overpainted. This was done free-handed, so that crescents and dimples of aqua ghosted the tomato-red edges. In harsh sunlight the new brush strokes showed wide and crude.
Inside, afloat on the reek of grease, cleanser, exhaust fumes, gasoline, hair oil and male cologne, all was untouched by the years passing outside. The wall by the office (long unused, to judge by the stacks of boxes inside) was shingled with girlie calendars, some of them dating back to WWII. The top of the antique Coke machine opened onto horizontal steel slats. You put your money in and slid a bottle along slats to the gate, fished it out by the neck. The bottom was filled with cool water of uncertain vintage. Didn’t pay to look too closely, no telling what might be swimming down in there.
The Fairlane was a street car, no doubt about it. And the owner had taken pains to make it look unprepossessing, which made Driver wonder if the owner could have been someone like him, someone doing, in some shape or form, what he used to do. Just as he wondered how the car came to wind up on that lot among the sheep. And why no one had recognized it for what it was.
Or had they?
Once Driver had paid for the car, he asked to see a mechanic.
“You do understand-”
“I just want to talk to him. And not a service manager. One of the guys with grease lines in his hands he can’t get rid of.”
He’d driven the car around back and gone in. Luis glanced at the car over his shoulder, then gave Driver a look before nodding.
So he knew.
Driver asked, and Luis told him about Boyd’s. Man named Matthew Sweet owned it, Sweet Matt everyone called him, him and his wife Lupa, they’d rent out time, a bay, tools, whatever he needed. Good people there, he said. To go with your good car.
It all took Driver back: the smells, poking about in the Fairlane’s innards, sliding under and out and under again, tearing a gash in his hand when a wrench slipped, Spanish tumbling off the walls around him. Back to his early days, when he was first finding his skills in garages much like this one, and at the makeshift track in the desert between Tucson and Phoenix. Herb was the beginning of it, an outsider like him who he befriended at school and for whom engines, transmissions, and suspensions were living, breathing things. Then Jorge and his family and the family’s friends, which amounted to most of the population of South Tucson. That had been the first time Driver ever felt like he fit in anywhere.
He remembered Manny back when he was on one of his favorite harangues about words and misuse of same. They were drinking in a dive out by LAX, a self-styled blues bar, some guy playing guitar with his teeth at two in the afternoon for an audience of four dedicated drunks, a hooker, a couple of Japanese businessmen in suits, and them. Manny’d slammed back another glass of wine and taken a sudden turn.
“You ever look at a thesaurus? One-third of the damn thing is index. That’s the way our lives are. We spend a third of it trying to figure out the other two-thirds.” You never knew what was going on in there with Manny.
With anyone, really.
Like that guy over by the Coke machine, shaved eyebrows and head, jailyard stance, forested with tattoos. Looked like a thousand he’d known. Only this guy’s tattoos were all religious-he was walking stained glass-and he had the sweet smile of a child.
“It’s like everything else in life,” Manny had said yesterday on the phone. “You have to decide what you want, else you just keep spinning around, circling the drain. You want to get away from the guys?”
“Sure I do.”
“Or you want to put them down?” He waited, then laughed. “Well, there it is, then. We ponder and weigh and debate. While in silence, somewhere back in the darkness behind words, our decisions are made.”
Driver wasn’t sure he’d ever made a decision, not in the sense Manny meant. You stayed loose and when the time came, you looked around, saw what was there, went with it. Not that you let things push you, but you moved faster with the current than against. It was like reading signs, following spoor.
Manny of course would insist that such claims were BS that bore the stain of religion.
“Signs? What bleedin’ signs? What, someone put up speed limits, cattle crossings?” Anything not completely rational, for Manny it was the religious impulse incognito or in drag. That day at the blues bar he’d got onto atheists.
“Worse than Christians. So dead certain and full of themselves. Got their own little religion going, don’t they. Own set of rituals, psalms, Hanukkahs, hosannahs. Can’t say a word to them they’ll hear.”
Then, in his usual hopscotch, dropping in random accents and cadences from scripts he’d recently worked on:
“Free will, my hairy ass. What we believe, books we hold in high regard, hell, even the music we listen
to-it’s all programmed, my boy, burned into us by heredity, background, what we’re exposed to till it takes. We think we make choices. But what happens is the choices walk up, stand face to face with us, and stare us down.”
“So you believe a man’s path, the way of his life, is set?”
“Re: belief, see above. But yes, we come suddenly alive, we scamper around like a cockroach when lights go on, and then the light goes off.”
“That’s damned bleak, Manny.”
“No argument here. But those moments of light, as we scamper-they can be glorious.”
A decision? Maybe when he’d come above ground. But, really, hadn’t he drifted there too? Fetched up in an apartment out in Mesa with enough of a cut from the last job that he needn’t worry about getting back to work any time soon. Everything close to the ground and earth-colored, sky stretched out for miles overhead and all around, bright baking sun, shadows with edges like blades. Walking to meals, he passed an upholstery shop, two churches, Happy Trails Motel, a quick-serve oil and lube, BJ’s Hobby amp; Stamp Store, a Thai restaurant the size of a house trailer, apartment complex after apartment complex with names like Desert Palms, filling stations, used tire shops, Rainbow Donuts. What first had seemed to him exotic-from another world, quite literally-began to take on the tincture and unremarked weight of the familiar.
For a time it felt almost as though he were back in foster homes, as though he’d been dropped into yet another temporary location. Any moment they’d come retrieve him, take him elsewhere.
A week went by. Then another. Waitresses knew him by sight now. Cooks having a smoke out back of the Thai place waved as he passed.
Somewhere in there, halfway down a block perhaps, or while crossing a street, somewhere between one first light and nightfall, he realized this was it, he wasn’t going back to the old life.
He was 26, and on his way to becoming Paul West.
Twenty-six, with no employment history to speak of, no references, no commercial skills and few enough social ones. One thing he knew. He knew cars.
