by James Sallis
“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 & 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.
In the town of Guadalupe, a small Hispanic and Native American community between Tempe and Phoenix, he found a garage with a spare bay to rent. Mostly, they did customizing—paint jobs, rockers, lifts, your basic muscle-car calls—and he started off catching overflow and stuff the others didn’t want to do. A heads-up to Felix brought in a private job or two, then more. The other mechanics noticed, watched and spread the word, and before he knew it he had more work than he could handle. Gradually he was able to back off the add-on work and concentrate on restorations. He put a couple of classics together, a Hudson and a British roadster, then built a commissioned racer to specs from the ground up. The check from that one got him thinking about other possibilities.
He scouted out a garage with a large storage space that could be turned into an office, in the ramshackle industrial section just south of downtown. Once part of a chain, the place had been abandoned for years, and he got it for next to nothing. Started off buying, refurbishing and selling classic cars. Then, having built up a decent inventory—he wasn’t part of it anymore, and didn’t want to be, but he knew how things worked out there—he built up a rental service to Hollywood studios. They needed a Terraplane or vintage Rolls, Paul West had one, in fine shape and camera-ready.
Paul West also had a secretary and two employees. And Driver wondered sometimes how they were holding out, what they were doing. Maybe they’d figure a way to take over the business, keep it up and running.
— • —
Five days pretty much nonstop and he had the Fairlane where he wanted it.
Kind of place it was, the others stayed cool, left him to his work, but they’d been watching.
“Righteous,” a voice said from somewhere above size-10 BKs that came up over the ankles and had so many colors to them they looked like clown puke.
Driver rolled out from under. Short guy, white—whiter than Driver—but he spoke the local Spanish like a native and knew everyone. Family, maybe. Not a regular, but he’d been around.
“You figuring on flying that shit to Mars or what?”
“It needed a little work.”
“A little work’s not what you did, friend. What you did was take Gramma’s sweet ride and turn it into something’s gonna be out there looking for meat six times a day. You could hang a building off that trans, the torque it’ll take now.”
“Maybe I got a little carried away.”
“And carried the wheel base up a notch or two with you, from the look of it. Cut-and-fill?”
“More like hack-and-fill, but yeah, it’ll stay on the ground. Somebody’d already started the job, I finished it.”
“Nose?”
Driver nodded. “Wheels moved forward. Ditched the front suspension for a straight axle, buggy springs.”
“Four-barrel?”
“Right. It’s Seventies. Four-barrel standard, 429 cubes.”
“Smooth. And sweet as cream.” He reached out and patted the car tenderly on the rear fender, the way one would a horse’s flank. The third finger was missing. Rings on all the others. “Looks like the desert and a long moonlight ride’s gonna be whispering in your ear ’bout any day now.”
“Definitely on the list of things that could happen.”
“When it does, you have yourself a good ride, every minute of it.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Best times of your life, just you and the road, leaving all the rest of this shit behind.”
“I hear you.”
The man nodded a half inch or so and walked away.
Were they the best times? In many ways, absolutely. Out there loose and free and moving fast, away from everything that works so hard to hold you in place. Once you had that feeling, once it soaked into your bones, you never got over it, and nothing else ever came close.
But sooner or later, as Manny always reminded him, you had to pull over and get out of the car.
He’
d barely got back under when a second set of shoes, pink hightops well-smeared with grease this time, hove into view and didn’t go away. He rolled out. She worked at the far end, by the vertical door that stayed propped open on fifty-gallon drums. Everyone called her Billie or just B. Strictly business, from what he’d seen. Hispanic, but second, third generation.
“Yes ma’am?”
First she looked startled. Then she laughed.
“Sweet ride, but how’ll it fit in, there in Scottsdale?”
“Any luck at all, she’ll never have to find out.”
“She, huh?”
He waited what actors would call two beats and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She laughed again and waved toward the hood. When he told her to be his guest, she popped it. Came up for air shaking her head.
“That’s some serious head room.”
“Never know what you might need.”
“Right, and when you think you do, it usually turns out to be the wrong thing.” Her fingers had left a smudge on the hood. Noticing, she bent to wipe it with her shirt tail. A man’s denim shirt, well faded, sleeves rolled to her biceps. Loose khaki-colored cargo pants. “I wouldn’t mind taking that for a ride.”
His turn to laugh.
“Guess you heard that one before,” she said.
“Once or twice. Not in this context.”
She looked around. “Some context we got here. This the part where the music comes up, you know, strings and shit?”
“Probably not.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
***
In addition to oleanders, crickets and cracks, the new place had a TV, and as he sat there that night finishing up his carry-out Bento Box from Tokyo Express with hot air blowing from window to window and the swamp cooler heaving, local news gave way to a movie and suddenly he was looking into Shannon’s face.
Part of his face, actually—seen in a rearview mirror. But it was him. Shannon was the best stunt driver who ever lived, a legend really, and the one who’d given Driver a leg up, got him into the business. Bought him meals, even let him sleep on his couch. Ten months after Driver’s first solid job, on a routine stunt like hundreds he’d done before, Shannon’s car went off a cliff, somersaulted twice, and sat rocking on its back like a beetle, cameras rolling the whole time.
This movie was titled Stranger, about the self-appointed guardian of a small community. You never saw him, just his car, a Mercury, pulling up at an overlook or turning in behind a suspicious vehicle, and once in a while his arm in the window, a shadowy profile or a slice of face in the mirror, or his back and neck as he sat watching. You never found out what the man’s motivations were. The movie had been made on the cheap, so instead of an actor they’d just used Shannon for those bits. There was kick ass driving all through. Not much of a script, when you got right down to it. But the movie had that sheen that cheap films often have when the makers are shooting something they believe in, working with next to no money, time, or resources, reaching hard for effect.
Had to be an old movie, since Shannon, the parts of Shannon he could see anyway, looked young. Probably made by youngsters with little more than a gleam in their eyes and a credit card. They’d be huge now or selling real estate somewhere.
That night, as a predicted rain eased down outside, memories mixed with twisted versions of scenes from the movie in his dreams. The next day he caught the Crown Vic in the rear view and realized what it meant, he almost laughed.
— • —
No doubt about its following him. Late model, nondescript gray, two men. He’d turned off Indian School, swung up to Osborn, then onto Sixteenth and they were still there. He took a residential street, one that looked wide and inviting but that, at the end of a long, curving block, ran headlong into a maze of apartment complexes and curlicue feeders. He’d come across it months ago and from sheer force of habit filed the location away. The area was riddled with stubs of pavement abutting the street, where private driveways had been before the complexes took over. Accelerating and taking a turn or two, just enough to get out ahead, he backed into one of those stubs and shut off the engine. Cars were parked along the streets on both sides—another plus. Across from him two young men unloaded furniture looking to be mostly veneer from a van that dipped alarmingly each time one of them climbed aboard.
DOS AMIGOS MOVERS
WE GET THE JOB DONE
Driver got out and walked over.
“Give you a hand there?”
They looked at him, then at one another, and rightfully so, with suspicion. One was crowding six foot, light complected with startlingly black hair that swept to either side like a crow’s wings. The other was short and deeply brown, hair sparse but long, upper arms like bags filled with rocks.
“I live just up the block.” Driver hooked his head. “Back there. Work at home, fourteen-fifteen hours a day I’m nose to nose with a computer screen. Then I got to get out, move around some. You know?”
“We can’t pay you, friend.” This from the shorter one, who seemed more or less to be in charge and more or less to be doing the lion’s share of the heavy lifting.
“Don’t expect it.”
Moments later, as Driver came down the ramp with an end table in one hand, lamp in the other, he saw the Crown Vic cruise past at a slow trot. It pulled up by the Fairlane, the passenger got out and checked, looked around, got back in. Never did more than glance across at three poor slobs unloading furniture. The Crown Vic came back by twice as they emptied the van, four minutes or so between laps, so they were sweeping the complexes, looking hard for whatever signs they thought they might see. Last lap, the guy on the passenger side was talking on a phone. The Crown Vic picked up speed and was gone.
“Better get back to it, I guess,” Driver said.
“Back in the saddle, right. Hey, man—much thanks for the help. Cold beer in the cooler up front if you want one.”
“Next time.”
“Any time.”
— • —
Two days later he’s sitting at the mall swallowing bitter coffee when the guy at the next table says “You’ve made Carl unhappy.”
Driver looked over. Thirtyish, dress shirt and slacks, could be a sales rep on break or the manager of Dillard’s across the way.
“Carl is good at one thing and one thing only. That is pretty much his life. But you lost him.”
“I take it Carl drives a grey Crown Vic.”
“And when Carl’s unhappy, it’s like…well, it’s as though small black clouds spring up everywhere.” He held up his cup. “Grabbing a refill, get you anything?”
“I’m good.”
While the man was gone, a couple of teenagers took the table. He came back and stood there silently until they got up and moved away. He sat down. Some kind of slush drink, so that he kept tilting his head back, letting the soft ice slide down his throat.
“You and Carl of the Black Cloud, I assume you’d both have the same business address.”
“More or less.”
Pretty much, more or less: evidently his visitor came from a world of approximations, one where perception, judgment, even facts, were in suspension, and could shift at a moment’s notice.
A security guard strolled by, walkie-talkie in hand, pant legs six inches too long in the crotch and well chewed at the bottom. Driver heard “down by the food court, be about,” then he was gone.
“And what business might that be?”
“Diversified, actually.” Again the man’s head went back as the cup tilted. A thin line of red slush ran down his jaw.
“For the moment it seems to be me.”
“For the moment.”
“I don’t much care for being followed,” Driver said.
“Few of us would.” He looked off at two teenagers walking out of Spencer’s. One would push the other, who’d stagger off, come back and push him. They kept at this as they proceeded down the mall. Both wore hightops without laces. “You think abo
ut stuff much? Why you’re here, what it all means?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah. Knew a guy back in law school, more years ago than I want to think about, that did. Boy thought he was going to change the world. All he had to do first, was get to what the problems were, you know?”
