by James Sallis
“The money?” Driver said.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Knowledge again.” Driver put both hands in plain view on the steering wheel. “Then I’m afraid you won’t be leaving this car.”
“You think you can do that?”
“Where I live, it happens in a minute. A minute later the do-er’s grabbing a sandwich.”
The oldster pulled up by Mail N More. He took a plastic grocery bag out of his back pocket and snapped it open, went in. Came out with what looked to be only a few pieces of mail in the bag.
“Probably the high point of his day.”
“Perspective is everything,” Driver said.
“Yeah.”
They sat watching the golf cart make its way back along the street, cars stacking up behind.
“I finished school, top ten percent of my class, had it made. All these firms on campus looking for talent, gladhanding me. Grabbed at the job when a top firm offered. There’s like three chiefs and two hundred Indians, every one of them in the top ten percent, every one of them scary smart. Turns out the firm hadn’t hired another Indian, they’d just bought themselves a new horse.”
Driver was silent.
“The corral’s on Highland, near 24th Avenue. Genneman, Brewer, and Sims. This particular errand came from Joseph Brewer’s assistant, Tim. Yellow hair. Not blond, yellow. And clothes just a little too tight. That’s what I know.” The cart turned eastward off the street four blocks up. “For the record: I made the delivery. I leave, reboot at the office, everything’s square.”
“And no one knows about our conversation.”
“My point.”
“As I said, it was private.”
Driver got out, watched the Saturn as it pulled away. He found himself thinking of the man, not much younger than he was, actually, as a kid. What was that phrase Manny used? Spilled anew into the world. A new horse, the kid had said. Ridden-he was definitely ridden.
Joseph Brewer’s assistant, Tim Bresh, lived in one of the enclaves near Encanto Park, a jumble of old Craftsman homes and carport suburbans from the fifties. Half the Craftsmans looked trashed, half of them gussied up and gentrified. Lots of For Sale signs out front of both. Bresh’s sat between a long-unpainted wooden house all but invisible behind a screen of oleanders, and another of slump block painted such a vivid white that it looked unreal, not of this world. Bresh’s was off-white, ivory maybe, but where mowers and ground water and time had nibbled at borders, patches of aqua showed.
Having posed as a messenger with a sign-for package addressed to Joseph Brewer, Driver had bluffed his way into the upper digestive tract of Genneman, Brewer, and Sims, to the outer office of Brewer himself and there tagged Bresh, yellow hair and all. The package, not that it mattered, contained a book, the latest full-tilt indictment of pyramid-scheme capitalism and those who fed off it. Driver liked to imagine Brewer picking up the book repeatedly, puzzling over its source and message. Realistically, he knew the bastard had probably just tossed it in the shredder. Or had his assistant do so.
“I’ll get it,” someone said from inside when Driver hit the bell.
A woman opened the door. Tall, halter top, shorts, thin armsspindly came to mind. Her hair was wet, from a shower, from swimming. She and Driver stood listening as the intro to “Sympathy for the Devil” faded.
“Gets me every time,” the woman said.
“That’s quite a doorbell. Is Tim-”
But there Tim was, stepping up behind her. In his hand he had what looked to be a brandy snifter filled with what smelled to be Bailey’s. He stared a moment.
“Don’t I know you?”
Then he had it.
“The package. That book, Street Smarts, with the S made of dollar signs. Cute. I’m sure Joe’s home wading into the thick of it as we speak, just his sort of thing.” He stopped, as though taking a minute to wonder what Driver’s sort of thing might be. Hard to say what was showing in his face. Wariness? Speculation?
“What can I do for you?” he said. “You don’t seem to be making a delivery.”
“Carry-out this time.” Driver had edged into the room.
“Okay.”
“Maybe your friend should leave.”
“Or you should.”
Driver shook his head.
“Look.” Bresh moved farther inside, to allow him more room. “GBS has eighteen lawyers, not to mention paralegals, secretaries, and the usual office trash. That’s a lot of personalities, a lot of egos-even without the clients, who, given the firm’s fees, tend to be a demanding lot. And who do you think keeps the thing running? Me. So, same as I say day after day, just tell me what you want.”
“One of your lawyers made a drop out in Glendale early this morning. Black, late twenties, driving a Saturn.”
“I can’t-”
“I know what he dropped, and why. I need to know who made the call, who sent him. Your name floated to the top.”
“I see. And you need to know this because?”
Driver didn’t answer right away. Finally he said, “Because I’m here and asking quietly.”
“You followed me.”
Driver nodded. He saw in Bresh’s eyes that he had it all, the fake delivery, the tag, all of it.
“It wasn’t me,” Bresh said. “I called Donnie, sure, passed the message along. That’s what I do mostly. It’s a big place, GBS.”
The woman nodded, though it was more of a bob. “Huge. It just kinda goes on and on.”
“You work there too?”
“Computer geek. Timmy thinks he runs the show. I’m the one who really does.”
“You know those guys you always see in the mall and so on,” Bresh said, “old guys with bowling pin heads, a big round belly, and pipestem legs sticking out the bottom? That’s what GBS is like, only under the round belly there’s like a hundred legs, all of them going in different directions.”
“Now’s when Timmy usually breaks into his rogue bulldozer speech. Hope you’re not in a hurry.”
“You ever read Weber?” Bresh went on. “About bureaucracies? Firms like GBS, that’s what they came down to long ago. It’s all about not losing one’s seat on the bus, all about keeping the machine running the way it always has. Everything else-clients, employees, law itself-is secondary.”
“Doesn’t sound much like your loyalty oath took.”
“I’m part of the machine-”
“I am the bulldozer!” his friend said.
“-but that doesn’t mean I can’t see it.”
Bresh put his drink down on the narrow table just inside the door. Its far end was taken up by a transparent blue vase of silk flowers, cattails, and feather fans on long handles. In the center sat a wicker basket heaped with milky-white crystal eggs not much larger than marbles.
“There’s a man kept on retainer who does work for the company from time to time. Supposedly a messenger service, that’s how it’s billed, though there’s no listing for such anywhere I’ve looked.”
“What kind of work?”
“Can’t really say. Doesn’t happen in my yard. He liaisons with a junior partner.”
“And that’s where the call, your call, came from? To send the money out with Donnie?”
Bresh nodded. “Richard Cole, that’s who you want to talk to. You can catch him at the office tomorrow, follow him home. Or-” He picked the drink up again and turned toward what was presumably the kitchen, speaking as he went. “Or I could just give you his address.”
“Don’t care for cards, do you?”
Bill didn’t look at him. Another goddamned beautiful day outside the window. The window, of course, was sealed.
“Or TV. Or much of anything ’round here, you come right down to it. Am I right?”
Wendell turned back from the blinds he’d opened. Sunlight fell like a sloppy drunk across the floor.
“’S all about choices, Mr. Bill. I can choose not to be a crackhead dog like my mother was. You can choos
e not to lay up in there like a man who’s dying when we both know you’re not. Not hardly.”
Wendell laughed. Lot of chest in that laugh.
“Choices. Listen to me, I sound like one of the social workers always giving ol’ mom their good advice. Not to mention, a few of ’em, six or ten inches of hard dick.”
Despite himself, Bill laughed.
“There it is. Not something dead and dying men do a lot, laugh. Good thing, too. You imagine how noisy graveyards would get to be?”
Bill sat on the edge of the bed. Wendell was handing him his shoes. Rubbed at the tops with his shirt sleeve as he did so.
“Tell you what. ’Bout ten minutes, they’re gonna be starting up a gospel singalong out there in the day room. I saw the choir members when they got off the bus, be one hell of a racket made. And I’m not much more of a mind to sit through that than you are. What say you and me go for a walk? Get good earth under our feet.”
Back his first year in town, he and Shannon were on the set of Doomtown Days, a post-apocalypse film. Studios were turning out a lot of them then, mostly on shoestring budgets. Reluctantly heroic, barely dressed man or woman stalking across the wasteland alone, communities gone feral, automotive equivalents of zip guns, zombie sheep, that sort of thing.
Shannon had just said that the director looked to be all of sixteen years old. “Kid musta clipped out an ad from the back of a comic book. Want to direct movies? Sent in his two dollars.”
There was a guy hanging around the edges, wearing a print shirt, creased high-pocket trousers. Neither young nor old, good-looking or plain, nothing to draw attention to him. Driver pointed, asked who’s that?
“Danny Louvin. Everything you see here goes back to him.”
Driver looked again. Put a Your-Name-Here ID bracelet on him, a puka-shell necklace, he’d win the award for uncool. “That’s the money man?”
“The money man’s sitting over there in the producer tent. Knit shirt, leather loafers? Danny’s the one who keeps it running, makes it all work.”
“He doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”
“That’s how good he is.”
Driver remembered that as he drove out Cave Creek Road. Clump after clump of housing developments squatted on what within easy memory had been bare desert. He wondered if, late afternoons, the coyotes still came out, and what they must think about all this. Dark swatches showed on the hills where clouds blocked sunlight, making the landscape look like parts from two different worlds hastily patched together.
He was thinking about the people you see and the ones you don’t, the ones who really run things. Take this too far, it blooms to paranoia, you start finding conspiracies in how cereal boxes get lined up on the shelf. Consider it too little, you’re a fool.
Bresh believed that he ran the office at GBS, he was the one who kept things together. Maybe he was. And what about Beil, who claimed to be merely a broker, an arranger, a middleman? How far did his influence extend? Was there a wizard for every curtain? Or just one, behind all the curtains?
Billboards advertising a new community under construction out this way showed a string of faces from infant to elderly and read The Better Life You’ve Been Looking For. Driver remembered something else Shannon had told him, the story of a traveller who gave his life because he wanted to visit a town that was like all others in its area, but forbidden. He remembered it because the writer had been there when Shannon told the story. Two days later that same situation showed up in the ongoing rewrite of the script.
Richard Cole’s home was green stucco and had fake logs or at least fake stubs of logs built high into the outside walls. Plastic barn owls stood at each corner of the roof, searching the skies. Two cars in the driveway, a midnight blue Lexus and a red two-seater BMW.
No door bell, but a knocker shaped like a bear’s head. Driver used it then stepped aside, to the edge of the peephole’s sweep, turning to look away, as if in appreciation of the landscape.
“Who is it?” came from inside.
Driver didn’t respond. After a moment the door started open. Driver waited. When it was fully open, and the man stood there, anger and presumption spilling off his face, Driver took a single step forward and hit him once, hard as he could, directly in the forehead. Watched him stagger back and go down, saw the other guy come up from the couch.
“Bad idea,” Driver said.
The guy sat down. The two of them were dressed almost like twins, loose-fitting tan slacks, blue broadcloth shirts, soft, costly leather slip-ons. As Cole got back to his feet, this one slid furtively down to reach for the cell phone in what had been designed a century ago as a watch pocket.
“Worse idea,” Driver said. The guy held up both hands, palms out.
Cole looked at his friend, made a disgusted face, and looked back. His forehead was turning dark. “Who are you?”
“A delivery boy. Like Donnie.”
No response.
“Donnie-who, at your urging, carried a padded envelope into Mail N More this morning?”
Still nothing.
“What you’re going to tell me is where your urge came from.”
“Get out of my house.”
Driver turned as if to go, then spun back, right foot hooking Cole’s knee, pulling his legs out from under him. The man went down with a loud crack that probably heralded concussion. Driver planted the foot on his stomach.
“Please,” Driver said.
Cole didn’t try to move, but his eyes were going everywhere, north, south, east, west. White ceiling. Beige walls. Furniture legs. Ivory carpet. His friend’s feet showing beneath the couch. None of it any help.
That’s how suddenly the world you were sure you understood can change, Driver thought.
Cities were so various, they wore so many different faces. Leaving the easy, spare opulence of Cave Creek and Carefree behind, he drove in past Deer Valley Road and the federal prison to the dry-stalk stretches of outer Phoenix, and it was as though he drove through not one but half a dozen cities stacked beside and atop one another. Churches had re-upped as tax offices. A huge store and lot once given over to selling farm machinery was now a swap meet. The Dairy Queen, nothing changed but the sign, had become Mariscos Juarez.
Turn left at a gated community, two blocks away people are hauling mattresses down outside stairs and cooking on driveways in vats the size of cannibal pots.
Darkness was well on its way, spreading its hand flat against the city, as he drove back in. Billie had offered her uncle’s place to him. “For as long as you need it,” she’d said, Uncle Clayton currently residing several thousand miles away “helping repair some of the damage we’d done earlier,” whatever that meant. She’s saying for as long as you need it, but he’s thinking until they find me there, and declined. So he was at an extended-stay hotel two blocks up and another over, a knight’s move, from Colter and Twelfth. One room with a single entrance and the windows bolted shut, but they weren’t anymore. And he had full view of the approach, driveway, parking lot.
He also had a diner across the street, where he and Billie were meeting. Enough red-roof outside, booth covering, tiles, seats at the counter, aprons, napkins-to send you away color blind, but good, cheap food. Waitresses, like the diner itself, looked to be from the fifties. They took your order, stepped away, turned and came back with your food, that’s how it felt.
Billie had come directly from the garage in work clothes and boots, grease under her nails, a Nike swoosh of it down one cheek. Everyone in the diner gave the impression of having barely arrived from one place while being eager to depart for another. Feet fidgeted under tables. Eyes swung toward windows.
Not just here, Driver told himself. The whole world’s like that now.
He remembered standing over Bernie Rose’s body in L.A., there at frontier’s end, as Bernie’s final breath hissed out. Remembered getting back in the stripped-down Datsun, feeling comforted by its throb, thinking that he drove, that was what he did, that was
what he’d always do.
“Interesting group,” Billie said. “Starting with the waitresses’ costumes.”
“If you mean the hair and all, I don’t think that’s a costume.”
“Uh-huh. And the cook?” Periodically his head had appeared in the gunwale through which plates passed from kitchen to servers. Thin hair parted severely at the side, nose that seemed to be drawing the face relentlessly forward. “Too many black and white movies?”
Just then a group of five, mixed men and women, came in from some affair or another, made out as zombies. Torn clothes, pasty white faces, blackened eyes, splatters of food color, beads of drool. All of them staggered about, arms flailing as though subject to a different musculature, a different gravity. They took a corner booth, where one of them began quietly to chant Flesh! Flesh!
Driver was halfway through his Breakfast-Any-Time. He put his fork down and said, “I need to tell you something.”
“Wondered when you’d get to it.”
“That obvious, huh?”
“Not really.”
“But?”
She shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
And he told her. Not so much about the older life, just the bare bones of that. But about how he had stood over Elsa’s body, how in the past he had killed, again and again. How killers were now coming for him. How they kept coming, might well keep coming for the rest of his life. How short that rest might be.
When he stopped talking, she looked away, then back at him.
“They’re eating salads,” she said. “The zombies.” She popped in the last bite of burger. “So in other words, you find yourself unaccountably pursued-fatally, you assume-by unapprehended forces.”
“Those are definitely other words. But yeah, that’s pretty much it. Hard to believe?”
“No, I’m just sitting here wondering what my philosophy teacher would have to say. Dark room, dark hat. Shoulder to the door against an unseen, silent, unknown resistance. An interesting man. ‘Actuality is something brute,’ he’d tell us. ‘There is no reason in it.’ Yet everything in his own life, how he talked, how he taught, the way he dressed, seemed nailed to logic’s door.”
