by James Sallis
“Until he knows who’s looking.”
“Ever think about trying a phone?”
“He’s more a face-to-face guy.”
“In-your-face from the look.”
“It’s happened.”
She had a rubber band in her teeth as she pulled her hair back. Talked around it, then slipped the hair through. “Any butts you need to kick for the next hour or so?”
“It can wait. You had something in mind?”
“I was going to see my father, thought maybe you’d come along.”
Willow Villa was in a stretch of commercial property that sprang up unannounced. One minute they were cruising past ranch houses and shrubs and double driveways, then signs were all around them. Bernard Capes, Chiropractor. Action Limbs and Prosthetics. Spine Mechanics. Physical Therapy Associates. As though some weird medical mall had claimed squatter’s rights and was taking form before your eyes.
Two cars in the visitor’s parking lot around back, one of them a 1968 Pontiac GTO that could have just come off the showroom floor. Driver and Billie watched as seven elderly ladies came out of the building, spent at least three minutes getting into the car, and drove slowly down the drive, hitting the street with a dip and loud clang.
Inside, they stopped to sign in. The air was cold and stale and smelled vaguely of raw alcohol. Two women sat at desks beyond the counter. One had an account or records book of some kind. The other was peering at a computer screen, and looked up. Her hair was three different colors, none of them natural, none of them, for that matter, found in nature.
“Hey, Billie.”
“Maxine. You’re back.”
“As of yesterday.”
“Your son’s better, then?”
“For now….Mr. Bill’s not in his room, honey.”
“Oh?”
“Out for a walk with Wendell, can you believe it? Getting to be a regular thing.”
“Which way?”
She pointed to the back of the building.
“Max always thought the boy just had asthma,” Billie said as they went back through the doors. “Two weeks ago he had a crisis, two o’clock in the morning the way it usually happens, and they wound up in ER at Good Sam. Came to find out it’s a heart defect, something that should have been caught years ago. There they are.”
Driver and Billie walked toward two men sitting at a plastic patio table. A scruffy Chinese elm struggled to give shade.
“Hi, Daddy, I thought you were out walking.”
The older man looked for a moment at Driver before answering.
Cop’s look, Driver thought.
“Wendell got tired.”
“Of course he did.”
“Wendell, you know my daughter. And she’s brought a friend. This,” he said, looking again at Driver, then at Wendell, “is my friend.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir. Miss Billie.” Wendell stood. Scars and a Special Forces tattoo intertwined with cords of muscle on his arms. “I’d best be getting back. You okay out here, Mr. Bill?”
Billie’s father nodded. Driver and Billie sat at the table. Off ten or twelve yards, where a path led to a stand of trees, a cat repeatedly scampered and leapt, twisting about in midair, as it stalked a huge Viceroy butterfly.
“Good to see you out here, Dad. This is Eight—long story, don’t ask. We work together.”
Both he and Driver were watching the cat. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Billie waited. “I’m afraid my father doesn’t have much to say these days.”
He turned back, looked at Driver.
“So you work with my girl. Not another damn lawyer, are you, like the last one?”
“No, sir. No, I’m not.”
“Not a lawyer? Or not like the last one?”
“Both.”
“And you got a number for a name, like in that Merle Haggard song.”
“Courtesy of your daughter, yes, sir.”
“Always did see things the way she wanted to. And that’s one of her good points.”
— • —
“We’re the descendents of the ones who ran—and of the ones who fought. You just gotta figure out when to what.” Felix looked up the alleyway. “Help soon be on the way in their pretty squads. Don’t think you’ll be wanting to take time to check out.”
They went over the wall together, into the lot of a quickie car service long closed down. Someone, kids most likely, had piled up a bunch of used tires back here and set them afire. Been a while, but the smell had moved in to stay.
“That does bring back memories,” Felix said, looking at the mound. “Your ride?”
“Over by Food City.”
They walked that way.
Half an hour ago Driver had returned to his room to find that things were not as he left them. Did their best to keep it from showing, but they’d been in the drawers where clothes had been refolded, his razor and toothbrush were out of place by an inch, and there was a faint odor, like an aftertaste, of sweet cologne. The smell’s what tipped him.
He went downstairs to the front desk. A stocky twentyish woman was on duty, her arms so thickly tattooed that she seemed to be wearing comic books for sleeves. She looked up. “Room got messed with, huh?”
He nodded.
“Dark blue sedan parked ’round back. Police, or claim to be.”
“See a badge?”
“You mean like the one I could buy off the street for the price of a cup of highlife coffee?”
When Driver pointed to the doorway leading back to storage and services, she nodded.
“No one back there?”
“Rarely.”
Minutes later Driver exited the rear door onto the parking lot pushing a steel cart piled with everything heavy he could find. Nested metal trashcans, five cinder blocks, a footlocker, an unopened box of foot-long rebar. He made as though to go left, toward the dumpsters. Both heads in the blue sedan swivelled to look, then turned back. When they did, Driver broke to a run, slamming the cart into the sedan so hard that he all but fell from the rebound. The passenger door buckled. The man on his side couldn’t get out. The other one came at him over the top of the car.
Driver pulled the cart back, caught the man between it and the car as he clambered down. The other one was out of the car now too, but that had to wait. Driver pulled the cart back, slammed it again into the man. Then again. And again. Till he heard a voice.
“Think we’re done here, friend.”
When Driver pulled the cart back, his man fell. Blood snailed from his mouth. His legs twitched.
Felix stood over the other one. “Heard the commotion back this way, occurred to me you might not be far off.”
Just before they’d gone over the wall, an elderly security guard had stepped around from the front of the building carrying a walkie-talkie. Seeing the wreck and the two on the ground, he’d stopped, raised both hands over his head, and quick-stepped back the way he came.
Now they were crossing the street to Food City. A Gran Torino, expertly streeted out and bearing a sprawl of exotic birds and equally exotic women painted in metallic blues and yellows pulled up at the light, bass pounding such that Driver and Felix could feel it coming up their legs from the pavement. The battered Toyota next to it had Rochelle, Juan, and Stephanie painted in script on the rear window, with tiny crosses beneath each.
“Still hanging in with the ride, anyway,” Felix said as they approached the Fairlane. “Even if you can’t seem to hold on to a residence for shit.”
As they walked, Felix told him what he’d come to tell him, before what he called that little mash-up in the parking lot.
“Doyle was on his best behavior, even made an appointment. Went limping in on time and took his seat politely in the waiting area. Plastic that looked like leather, he said, stuck to your skin, crackled every time you moved. Woodreau and Levin, Attorneys at Law. Out in Metairie. Lore was with him. Pretending to read a book, Doyle said, you shoulda seen it. Receptionist kept lookin
g over at him.
“Doyle gets back there and it’s some kid, looks like he’s sixteen. An associate, he says. ‘Didn’t come all this way to talk to an associate,’ Doyle tells him. ‘I assure you,’ the kid begins, and Doyle stops him. ‘Why don’t you save us both some worry and go bring back a grown man?’
“He does, and Doyle apologizes, tells this grown man how sometime when his leg gets to hurting he just turns a little cranky, you know? Asks the man if he served and the man says yes. ‘Navy?’ Doyle says, ‘you got that look about you.’ Man nods and asks how he can be of help.”
Felix had stopped at that point and said, “Amazing what simple courtesy can accomplish.”
“Absolutely. The Marine way.”
“Took him less than thirty minutes. And with only a little insistence. Didn’t even have to call in Lore, boy stayed out there pretending to read his book and smiling back at the receptionist whenever she’d look his way.
“Lawyers were blind. You knew that. Brokers, as Mr. Levin himself put it, to which Doyle responded that broke-ing was something he got forced to do as well, upon occasion. That, he said, had Mr. L’s attention.
“It was at that point that Mr. L thought it wise to call security and Doyle disagreed to such extent that Mr. L’s hand is now in a cast. Doyle was thinking maybe he should drop by again, be the first to sign it.”
“Probably not.”
“Yeah, probably.”
Someone behind them had said excuse me and when they turned, parting, two middle-aged men in shorts and sandals stepped between them. One held aloft a whitewashed cross, the other a four-foot wooden sword.
“There goes the human race and its entire history in a nutshell,” Felix said. He and Driver turned under the overpass and walked on.
“Doyle wants you to know how tracking this guy resembled looking for one specific snake in the Atchafalaya swamp.”
“But he did it.”
“Your man’s a cipher,” Felix said. “A businessman, one of those whose footprint shows up all over the place. Owns a car dealership, a theater or two, a chain of sporting goods stores, an import company, high-end wine shops, a dozen others. No trouble with the law, half a dozen court cases in civil court, mostly settled, no hands across the sea or across a checkered tablecloth with Sinatra singing. No apparent connection to you. Gerald Dunaway.”
“And he’s the one who wants to shut me down?”
Felix nodded. “That’s where it starts. One step off Dunaway’s porch, though, and riders start showing up.”
“Hired help.”
“Maybe just that. Hitchhikers, pilot fish. Or could be shared interests, whatever they might be. Alliances, coalitions, all those gentrified, uptown words for gangs. Doyle’s still poking at the anthill.”
They were at the car now. The door hadn’t fit right or worked well since the set-to with the Chevy Caprice and Toyota out by Globe. Driver kept meaning to fix it. He’d done the essential engine and suspension resets but let the body work hang. When he pulled the door open, it made a sound like swords coming out of scabbards in bad fantasy movies.
“Nice,” Felix said. “Distinctive.” He ran his hand along the door’s edge. “Interesting thing about this Dunaway is how he came into the money, the bulk of it anyway. Doyle has a friend, a service buddy, who works in the sheriff’s office over in Jefferson Parish. Says Dunaway’s one of those who lived uptown, stuck it out through Katrina. And afterwards, right after, he made a fortune or three selling food and water to the un- and re-located. No one knows where the food and water came from for sure, but rumors have them as diverted relief and humanitarian goods. After that, he started buying up huge sections of the city for pennies—all of this paper-legal, of course.”
“Sounds like carpetbaggers.”
“What I said. Doyle claims that New Orleans grows its own, always has. No need to bus them in.”
“This Dunaway married? Family? Children?”
“Wife died in 1998, accidental death according to official reports, suicide according to some unofficial ones. No one else we can tag.”
“He’s a native?”
“In the city since 1988. Brooklyn before that. Like I said, Doyle’s still tapping at it. And he taps good.”
— • —
“It’s in our nature—in our bones, our spleen, our amygdyla, or wherever we’ve gone to locating the ineffable this year—to try to connect the dots,” Manny said. “Just as it is to go rummaging around in the dark for that one idea that explains everything. Economics. Religion. Conspiracy. String theory.”
Driver had punched in the number fitfully, a backwash of sadness finding him as he did so. It was a feeling he had experienced before, this sense of doing something for the last time. You never knew its source.
“Things happen. They don’t have to add up to more. Hang on.”
Not that one, Driver heard him say. The bottle shaped like a fencepost, with the fake knotholes.
“Got a producer here. Grand plans and a budget to match. All he needs is a script. We’re dipping into the good stuff I save for special occasions.”
“The good stuff is in a bottle with knotholes?”
“Okay, they’re aesthetically challenged. But at what they do…”
Driver heard Manny take a sip, imagining palate and mood slowly changing color, rust to peach to pink, like that. Then he was back.
“Let’s run it down. Storyboard it. First you have this guy in NoLa. Dunaway. No doubt about what he’s in it for, you say.”
“Right.”
“But you don’t know why.”
“Again.”
“Different music, different lighting, late night with rain maybe, this Beil character turns up. Has a guardian angel or two sicced on you. And tries his best to press-gang you onto his ship. To fight for the common good, common bad, whatever. Next, a couple more get dropped in, these troopers that Beil’s men were shadowing. The guy at the mall, too? No idea where they hang hats. Makes for a thick soup, my friend. Any others in the cooker?”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
“Only if you live long enough.”
Manny took another sip. Driver could hear the producer talking there at the other end, wondered whether Manny was ignoring him or managing to carry on both conversations.
“Do the dots connect? Could be all random. Separate storms. And in the long run what does it matter? The question’s always the same: What do you do? How do you act? Hold on, I’m going out to the patio.”
Moments later, against a faint backdrop of traffic sounds, Driver heard “And are you acting?”
Driver said nothing.
“Because from here it starts to look like you’re hanging back. You remember when we first talked about this? I asked what it was you wanted.”
“Yes.”
“Same thing then. If you don’t want to carry through, you can go away again. Be missing.”
Manny waited, then said: “Grand ideas is what we’re taught. That mankind moves forward by grand ideas. You get older, you understand that nations aren’t formed or wars fought for grand ideas, they happen because people don’t want things to change.”
The thwack-thwack of a helicopter came over the line. Sounded like a weed cutter one yard over.
“Think about it. I gotta go in and make nice for the money man, do the greasy smile and all—there’s your creativity. Maybe we’ll discuss how in the last twenty years the top one percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s wealth double while their tax burden shrank by a third. Or not. Talk to you soon.”
At the time, both of them believed that.
— • —
The treatment Manny sketched out that day for the producer as barometric Scotch fell to the knothole and well below, riffing and spinning the story from whole cloth as he spoke, was about a man who drove, that was all he did, and about how he came to his end early one morning in a Tijuana bar. A hero for our time, the last frontiersman, Manny said. He almost said
“a man exempt” but thought that would confuse things. And while the producer wrote him a check on the spot, the movie, like so many others, never got made.
Years later, blurry-eyed and clang-headed one intolerably bright morning, Manny found his draft of the script, which he’d long forgotten. By early afternoon he had a revision. By midnight he had it with his agent at APA.
— • —
“It is good to see you again. You’ve given what I said due consideration?”
