by James Sallis
That was what being in this place was like.
In the dream from which he awakened, the bullets had struck softly, dimpling, then casting up puffs of dust and debris. They made soft pops, like the sound of lips being pulled gently apart.
The bullets (my bullets, as he always thought of them, the ones intended for me) had gone into the wall to his left and right. The shooter was nervous and new at this. The shooter was twelve years old.
That wasn’t how it happened, soft, slow. In life it happened fast. In an instant. But in the dream it got stretched, extended, elongated, it just went on and on…like his life here.
Dream. Memory. Who the fuck cared.
Once it was over, his partner was bleeding out and the kid lay dead by the wall.
Back when Driver was first discovering his gift, first realizing that cars and his life were inextricably intertwined, whenever things went wrong, with the family, one of the kids, or within the community, Jorge’s abuela would say, “You’ve seen the tip of the wolf’s ear.” Over the years he’d seen his share of ear tips, and of wolves.
He was at Boyd’s, fine-tuning the Ford following the Tucson jaunt. Outside, day gave way to night by a kind of gentlemen’s agreement, neither losing face: light still strong as shadows moved in from nearby hills and taller buildings. Pushing out from under the car he saw that, while the radio blared and lights blazed and tools lay where they had been in use, on floors and benches and hoods, he was alone. The other mechanics and workers and hangers-on were gone.
Instinctively he got to his feet, taking a long socket wrench with him.
What was it about these guys going around in pairs?
One stayed by the door as the other stepped toward him. Rail-thin, musculature standing out on his arms like add-ons. Never glanced at the wrench, but halfway across he held up his hands palm out.
Driver moved out from the car. Don’t want your back to the wall.
“A word, young man, nothing more. We’re not a threat.” Keeping the one hand in place, palm out, he stepped sideways to lower the radio’s volume. Accordion, fiddle, and guitarron fell away from the ear, became almost internal, part of the heartbeat.
“You had a pleasant trip earlier today?”
Driver nodded. Getting weirder all the time.
“While you were gone, you had callers. Left to their own wiles, and for no good reason-nothing to look for, nothing to find-they made a mess of your most recent home. A mistake those two will not be making again.”
His eyes went momentarily around the garage, taking it all in, then to the Fairlane.
“The car does not look like much.”
“That’s not what she’s about.”
The man dipped his head in affirmation. The skin on his forehead was deeply pleated, ridges that ran from his eyes right up to his hairline. You could plant crops in there.
“These men, the ones who came into your home, were expendable. Coins to be tossed. The ones who sent them, those with substance, are displeased with you.”
“I suspect they’re displeased with a lot of things.”
“There is that. But, first the man at the mall. Now these two.”
“With which I had nothing to do.”
“Those who sent them will assume otherwise.”
Driver was shifting around, watching both men closely, their reactions, body language, eyes. “What am I to these people?”
“A danger, imagined or otherwise? An irritant? An imperfection? Something to be removed. But-” His eyes followed Driver’s to the one posted at the door-“I don’t speak for them.”
Looking back, he moved slowly toward the Fairlane as Driver circled away, and rested a hand momentarily on the car’s hood.
“They have a smell to them, don’t they,” he said, “the good ones.”
Carefully he lifted the windshield wiper, tucked a card beneath, and eased it down.
“Mr. Beil asks that you have dinner with him. The time and address are on the card. He asks that I tell you it will be the best meal of your life.”
“I don’t-”
“Be hungry, Mr. West.”
Driver watched them leave, heard the car spit and catch and pull away. Momentarily the others began drifting in by various passways, all eyes going first to Driver. Soon the music was back up, the clangs and revs and burr of power tools back in place.
The card was thick stock, light blue with embossed silver letters, just the name, James Beil. Inscribed on the back in handwriting every bit as precise as the printing:
Fifth Corner, off 16th Ave, 9 p.m. A little over two hours away.
“Everything good?” It was the guy with the clown-puke BKs.
“ Esta bien. ”
“We were not far. We were watching, all of us.”
Like most statements, Driver thought, you could read it more than one way. But he nodded and said that was good to hear.
The man started off but, before Driver could put down the wrench, turned. “We had your back, is what I mean to say.”
Beil lifted his cup. Steam passed like a sweep of rain across his glasses. He blinked. “Do you know who I am?”
“Not the sous chef, I take it.”
“Hardly.”
“No clue, then.”
“Good. As it should be.” He downed a slug of the coffee. “Something we appear to have in common.” He drank again and set the cup down empty. “Among other things, I own this restaurant. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for you, thought we might have a drink first. Your preference is single malt, I believe.” A waiter stepped up carrying a crystal tumbler. “From Orkney. This Scotch has spent an appreciable time in its cask. Waiting, as it were?”
Driver lifted the glass in thanks and sipped, held it in his mouth.
“Age twelve, you watched your mother kill your father. You then lived for four years with a couple named Smith in Tucson-they are still in the house, by the way. Leaving with no good-byes, you became a stunt driver in L.A., one of the best, they say. I have seen your work, and would agree. It was the other career that didn’t go so well.
“You fall away from sight at that point, leaving bodies behind this time instead of a home. You surface a bit later, a new day, a new city, as Paul West. Years pass and again you vanish, only to pop up-or to stay low, it might better be said-here.
“Ah…and here it is.”
Driver thinking back to what Felix said, they know more about me than anyone should, as waiters lowered plates and platters onto the table. A pasta dish with clams, veal in a wine sauce studded with bright red peppers and capers, a cutting board of prosciutto and cheeses, a bowl of salad. Glasses set out for white and red wines. Sparkling water.
“Eat. Please.”
Driver tried to remember the last time he had done so. He’d had a breakfast burrito, what, yesterday, eleven or so in the morning? Once he’d served himself, the waiters conveyed the platters down the table to Beil, who spooned out small portions from each. They ate without speaking. Sounds gradually subsided past the doors to this private dining room.
“The restaurant is closing early tonight,” Beil said.
Looking around, Driver realized that the waiters had withdrawn. They were alone.
Beil finished with a final bite of salad, placed the fork on his plate diagonally, and crossed it with his knife. He poured himself fresh tea from a tulip-shaped pitcher. Sweet tea in the Southern fashion, Driver had discovered. He’d put the glass down and not touched it since.
“I grew up in Texas,” Beil said. “Not in the piney woods and not in any town, but in the wild, unclaimed stretches-unclaimable, really. Bare land every way you looked, and the horizon so far off it may as well have been The Great Hereafter. My mother and father were there but forever busy, he as foreman for one of the huge ranches, she as librarian for the county library in the nearest town. I had my room at the rear of the house, all but a separate domicile, and there I went about feeling my way along the years, putting together a life fro
m pieces of things, shiny things, discarded things, useless things, that I found around me, much as a bird builds its nest.
“In many ways it was like living in another country, another world. Even the air was different. The wind would shift, and you’d smell cattle, their rankness, their manure, coming from the ranch where my father worked, miles and miles away. Smells of earth, mold, stale water, and rot as well. And dust. Always the smell of dust. I’d lie in bed at night in absolute darkness thinking this might be a little what it was like being buried. I knew I had to get out of there.”
A crash sounded far off, back in the kitchen perhaps. Beil’s eyes didn’t go to the sound, but a smile came close to touching down on his lips. “Do you believe that some are born with a proclivity, a talent? For music, say, or for leadership?”
Driver nodded. “Only a few find it.”
“Exactly. Mine, I realized early on, was for problem solving. But I was also something of a contrarian, not as much interested in confronting problems as I was in finding a way around them. It would have made of me an extremely poor scientist, the discipline at which I first dabbled, but in other pursuits… Well, there you are, as they say.”
“And here I am.”
“Wondering why, no doubt.”
“It was an interesting invitation.”
“We work with what we have. You once drove, and now you drive again. Is that recidivism? Adaptive behavior? Or simply returning to what you are?”
“Yes would probably answer all those.”
“People attempting to kill you might well be construed a problem.”
“For which you have the solution.”
“Not at all. The problem is yours.” All sound from the restaurant had ceased. Through a small pane of glass in the door Driver saw the lights go out. “A solution, though-this could be another thing we have in common.”
A fterward, he drove to South Mountain. Well past eleven, and not a lot of activity out here, two or three convenience stores, a scatter of Mexican drive-throughs along Baseline. He found a boulder halfway up and sat looking down at the city’s lights. Planes came and went from the airport ten or twelve miles away, ripples in the dark and silence and boundless sky.
Driver didn’t want to go back to the new place, trashed or not. He couldn’t think of any place he did want to go. What he wanted was to get back in the car and drive. Drive away from all this. Or just drive. Like the guy back at the garage had said: just you and the road, leaving all the rest of this shit behind.
But he couldn’t. And what Beil had proposed-once they’d snaked past I work alone and They’ll keep coming — seemed, if not the best alternative, then certainly a feasible one.
“The people who engaged me-”
“As a problem solver.”
“Exactly. Like all of us, primarily they wish to restore order, to have things the way they were. But now there are imbalances. Problems with those moving the pieces around.”
“None of which has anything to do with me.”
“Your presence has introduced wholly unexpected variables. You’ve become a crux, of a sort.”
Driver’s attention went to what looked to be a collision down on Baseline. First, headlights moving toward one another too fast, then a hitch in time, then the lights gone suddenly askew. Did he hear the crash, a horn, seconds later? He remembered a night years ago back in L.A. when he sat in Manny’s banged-to-hell Mercedes on the northern flank of Baldwin Hills, in oil fields that appeared deserted but might for all he knew still be functioning. The gate was open, and they’d entered along a dirt road. The entire city lay before them. Santa Monica, the Wilshire District, downtown. Hollywood Hills in the distance.
“The diminutive fires of the planet,” Manny had said. “What Neruda called them. All those lights. The ones inside you, too. Your house is burning, that’s all you see. But get up here, get some distance, it’s just another tiny fire.
“We go through our lives agonizing over income or what others think, getting wound up about Betty LaButt’s new CD, who shot or fucked Insert-name-here on some TV show, or the latest skinny on the latest idiot with cheekbones who’s making a run for office, and all the while, governments go on killing their citizens, children die from food additives and advertising, women get beaten or worse, meth labs now take over the rural south the way kudzu once did, and we’re getting lies spoon fed to us at every turn.
“The most interesting thing about us as a species may be all the ways we figure out so we don’t have to think about those things.”
This from a the man who spent most of his life writing crap movies. Well, mostly crap anyway.
Emergency vehicles pulled in below, so yes, a collision.
Driver stood. The boulder he’d been sitting on was all but covered with paint-sprayed tags, scribblings, and knife etchings-Manny would have insisted upon calling them modern petroglyphs. In the dark Driver could only make out that they were there, not distinguish them. Tags, he figured, tags and hearts and dates and jumbled-up names. And if he could read them, they’d make about as much sense as everything else.
He drove back in along Southern and Buckeye, then spilled over to Van Buren and, surprised to see lights on at the garage, turned in. The door was unlocked. As he stepped through, a head leaned out from behind the hood of a bottle-green BMW.
“Everything all right?” he said.
“Would I be under here if it was?”
“I mean…” He looked around. The only lights were two floods over her space. Strange to have the place so silent. “It’s late.”
“And quiet.”
His face must have carried the question.
“You tilted your head, the way people do when they’re listening-just for a second there. Nice, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Love it. Being alone in the night, nothing much else in the world except what I’m working on.” She came out from behind the BMW. “I have a key. Lupa’s daughter and I, we went to school together. Anyway, this monster’s almost done.”
“Yours?”
“No way I could afford it. Or want it. But I can get it running smooth again, and the guy who owns it can’t do that. You notice the sidewalks just up the way?”
“Not really.”
“WPA, from 1928. More cracks than cement, so the city finally decides to repair them. One look and you can tell the old good stuff from the new crappy stuff.”
“I’ve got some poorly repaired cracks myself.”
“Not the right vintage.”
“A little earlier, true. Interesting thing to notice about the neighborhood.”
“Everything’s interesting. You just have to look closely.”
“And most people don’t.”
She shrugged. “Their loss.”
He was careful not to move closer. And while she seemed wholly at ease, body language told him she was every bit as watchful and aware. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
“You never had it.”
Caught without a response, he shook his head.
“You have legal motives in mind, say-oh, I don’t know, applying for a marriage license, checking my credit-put down Stephanie. Real life, I’m Billie. Long story, not very interesting.”
“I thought everything was.”
She turned to put down the feeler gauge she was holding and turned back. “You have possibilities, Eight.”
When he held his hands out and apart in mock supplication, she pointed to the stall where he usually worked. Right. Number eight.
They turned to the door in unison.
“You folks okay?” Floating in the gray behind concentric circles of blinding light, the cop stepped in. He pivoted the flashlight around the garage, up and down, then back to them before shutting it off. As their eyes readjusted, his partner came into sight at the door.
“Saw the lights on, commercial establishment. Kinda late, isn’t it?”
“And quiet,” Driver said.
The l
ead cop let that go. His eyes did a once-over, checking Driver’s hands, clothing, shoes, stance.
“We’re good, Officer,” Billie said. “I often work late.”
“Yes, ma’am, we’ve seen your lights on before. What about your friend here?”
“He works here too.”
“Sure he does.” The cop flipped his light back on, ran it along the BMW, shut it off. “You have papers on that car?”
“It’s a repair job, Officer, almost done. That’s what we do here. I can give you the name and number of the owner if you’d like.”
“Might need that. Right now, I’m gonna need to see some ID.”
Driver’s hesitation before reaching for his wallet was instinctive and fleeting. He didn’t think it showed. But afterwards he wondered if somehow Billie hadn’t caught it. She stepped toward the cop, pulling a drivers license out of the rear pocket of her jeans. The license was as well-worn as the jeans.
The cop took it, looked up at her, then back to the license.
“You Bill Cooper’s kid? The one in, what, law school?”
“At ASU, yes sir.” She held out her hand. He gave her the license. It went back in the rear pocket.
He stood a moment, glanced at Driver one more time, and said, “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am.” The two of them walked out. Driver heard both doors, heard the car start up. The cops had parked some distance from the garage.
“Wasn’t that interesting,” Billie said. “Broke the monotony of just another night running up someone’s bill, sopping up more grease, hanging out with a dude that came in off the street.”
She stepped almost up to him. The awareness was still there, but the watchfulness, for whatever reason, was gone.
“Could you do with a cup of coffee, piece of pie, something on that order? There’s a place up the street. If it’s a slow night we stand a fair chance of not getting shot, robbed, or poisoned by the food.”
In past lives, Butch’s had been a Steak Pit, a Hamburger Palace, a Mexican restaurant, and quite possibly a drive-through bank. Artifacts of those lives-general layout, smell, signs and tiles, an extensive driveway system-lingered. A “piece” at Butch’s turned out to be a quarter of a pie, and came on a dinner plate. Coffee arrived in cups the size of soup bowls. Probably did killer business once the bars skirting the edge of town shut down for the night. Which wasn’t too far off, come to think of it.
