Drive (2 page)
Authors: James Sallis
Up till the time Driver got his growth about twelve, he was small for his age, an attribute of which his father made full use. The boy could fit easily through small openings, bathroom windows, pet doors and so on, making him a considerable helpmate at his father’s trade, which happened to be burglary. When he did get his growth he got it all at once, shooting up from just below four feet to six-two almost overnight, it seemed. He’d been something of a stranger to and in his body ever since. When he walked, his arms flailed about and he shambled. If he tried to run, often as not he’d trip and fall over. One thing he could do, though, was drive. And he drove like a son of a bitch.
Once he’d got his growth, his father had little use for him. His father had had little use for his mother for a lot longer. So Driver wasn’t surprised when one night at the dinner table she went after his old man with butcher and bread knives, one in each fist like a ninja in a red-checked apron. She had one ear off and a wide red mouth drawn in his throat before he could set his coffee cup down. Driver watched, then went on eating his sandwich: Spam and mint jelly on toast. That was about the extent of his mother’s cooking.
He’d always marvelled at the force of this docile, silent woman’s attack—as though her entire life had gathered toward that single, sudden bolt of action. She wasn’t good for much else afterwards. Driver did what he could. But eventually the state came in and prised her from the crusted filth of an overstuffed chair complete with antimacassar. Driver they packed off to foster parents, a Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Tucson who right up till the day he left registered surprise whenever he came through the front door or emerged from the tiny attic room where he lived like a wren.
A few days shy of his sixteenth birthday, Driver came down the stairs from that attic room with all his possessions in a duffel bag and the spare key to the Ford Galaxie he’d fished out of a kitchen drawer. Mr. Smith was at work, Mrs. Smith off conducting classes at Vacation Bible School where, two years back, before he’d stopped attending, Driver had consistently won prizes for memorizing the most scripture. It was mid-summer, unbearably hot up in his room, not a lot better down here. Drops of sweat fell onto the note as he wrote.
I’m sorry about the car, but I have to have wheels.
I haven’t taken anything else. Thank you for taking
me in, for everything you’ve done. I mean that.
Throwing the duffel bag over the seat, he backed out of the garage, pulled up by the stop sign at the end of the street, and made a hard left to California.
They met at a low-rent bar between Sunset and Hollywood east of Highland. Uniformed Catholic schoolgirls waited for buses across from lace, leather and lingerie stores and shoe shops full of spike heels size fifteen and up. Driver knew the guy right away when he stepped through the door. Pressed khakis, dark T-shirt, sport coat. De rigueur gold wristwatch. Copse of rings at finger and ear. Soft jazz spread from the house tapes, a piano trio, possibly a quartet, something rhythmically slippery, eel-like, you could never quite get a hold on it.
New Guy grabbed a Johnny Walker black, neat. Driver stayed with what he had. They went to a table near the back.
“Got your name from Revell Hicks.”
Driver nodded. “Good man.”
“Getting harder and harder all the time to step around the amateurs, know what I’m saying? Everybody thinks he’s bad, everybody thinks he makes the best spaghetti sauce, everybody thinks he’s a good driver.”
“You worked with Revell, I have to figure you’re a pro.”
“Same here.” New Guy threw back his scotch. “Fact is, what I hear is you’re the best.”
“I am.”
“Other thing I’ve heard is, you can be hard to work with.”
“Not if we understand one another.”
“What’s to understand? It’s my job. So I’m pit boss. I run the team, call all the shots. Either you sign on to the team or you don’t.”
“Then I don’t.”
“Fair enough. Your call…”
“Another sparkling opportunity gone down the tubes.”
“Let me buy you another drink, at least.”
He went to the bar for a new round.
“I do have to wonder, though,” he said, setting down a fresh beer and shot. “Care to enlighten me?”
“I drive. That’s all I do. I don’t sit in while you’re planning the score or while you’re running it down. You tell me where we start, where we’re headed, where we’ll be going afterwards, what time of day. I don’t take part, I don’t know anyone, I don’t carry weapons. I drive.”
“Attitude like that has to cut down something fierce on offers.”
“It’s not attitude, it’s principle. I turn down a lot more work than I take.”
“This one’s sweet.”
“They always are.”
“Not like this.”
Driver shrugged.
One of those rich communities north of Phoenix, New Guy said, a seven-hour drive, acre upon acre of half-a-mill homes like rabbit warrens, crowding out the desert’s cactus. Writing something on a piece of paper, he pushed it across the table with two fingers. Driver remembered car salesmen doing that. People were so goddamned stupid. Who with any kind of pride, any sense of self, is gonna go along with that? What kind of fool would even put up with it?
“This is a joke, right?” Driver said.
“You don’t want to participate, don’t want a cut, there it is. Fee for service. We keep it simple.”
Driver threw back his shot and pushed the beer across. Dance with the one who bought you. “Sorry to have wasted your time.”
“Help if I add a zero to it?”
“Add three.”
“No one’s that good.”
“Like you said, plenty of drivers out there. Take your pick.”
“I think I just did.” He nodded Driver back into the chair, pushed the beer towards him. “I’m just messing with you, man, checking you out.” He fingered the small hoop in his right ear. Later, Driver decided that was probably a tell. “Four on the team, we split five ways. Two shares for me, one for each of the rest of you. That work?”
“I can live with it.”
“So we have a deal.”
“We do.”
“Good. You up for another shot?”
“Why not?”
Just as the alto sax jumped on the tune’s tailgate for a long, slow ride.
Walking away from Benito’s, Driver stepped into a world transformed. Like most cities, L.A. became a different beast by night. Final washes of pink and orange lay low on the horizon now, breaking up, fading, as the sun let go its hold and the city’s lights, a hundred thousand impatient understudies, stepped in. Three guys with skinned heads and baseball caps flanked his car. Couldn’t have looked like much to them. An unprepossessing 80’s Ford. Without popping the hood they’d have no way of knowing what had been done to it. But here they were.
Driver walked to the door and stood waiting.
“Cool ride, man,” one of the young toughs said, sliding off the hood. He looked at his buddies. They all laughed.
What a hoot.
Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog’s windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.
In his rear view mirror he watched the young tough’s buddies stand over him flapping hands and lips and trying to decide what the hell to do. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.
Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would.
Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.
Home was relative, of course, but that’s where he went. Driver moved every few months. In that regard things hadn’t changed much from the time he inhabited Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s attic room. He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time. He favored older apartment complexes where parking lots were cracked and stained with oil, where when the guy a few doors down played his music too loud you weren’t about to complain, where frequently tenants loaded up in the middle of the night and rode off never to be heard from again. Even cops didn’t like coming into such places.
His current apartment was on the second floor. From the front the dedicated stairway looked to be the only way up and down. But the back opened onto a general gallery, balconies running the length of each level, stairwells every third unit. A claustrophobic entryway just inside the door broke off to a living room on the right, bedroom to the left, kitchen tucked like a bird’s head under wing behind the living room. With care you could store a coffeemaker and two or three cookpans in there, maybe half a run of dishes and a set of mugs, and still have room to turn around.
Which Driver did, putting a pan of water on to boil, coming back out to look across at blank windows directly opposite. Anyone live over there? Had an inhabited look somehow, but he’d yet to see any movement, any signs of life. A family of five lived in the apartment below. Seemed like whatever time of day or night he looked, two or more of them sat watching TV. A single man dwelled to the right, one of the studio apartments. He came home every night at five-forty with a six-pack and dinner in a white bag. Sat staring at the wall and pulling steadily at the beers, one every half-hour. Third beer, he’d finger out the burger and munch down. Then he’d drink the rest of the beers, and when they were gone he’d go to bed.
For a week or two when Driver first moved in, a woman of indeterminate age lived in the unit to the left. Mornings, post shower, she’d sit at the kitchen table rubbing lotion into her legs. Evenings, again nude or nearly so, she’d sit speaking for hours on a portable phone. Once Driver had watched as she threw the phone forcibly across the room. She stepped up to the window then, breasts flattening against the glass. Tears in her eyes—or had he just imagined that? He never saw her again after that night.
Returning to the kitchen, Driver poured boiling water over ground coffee in a filtered cone.
Someone was knocking at his door?
This absolutely did not happen. People who lived in places like Palm Shadows rarely mixed, and had good reason to expect no visitors.
“Smells good,” she said when he went to the door. Thirtyish. Jeans looking as though small explosions had taken place here and there, outwards puffs of white showing. An oversize T-shirt, black, legend long since faded, only random letters, an F, an A, a few half consonants remaining. Six inches of blonde hair with a half-inch of dark backing it up.
“I just moved in down the hall.”
A long narrow hand, curiously footlike, appeared before him. He took it.
“Trudy.”
He didn’t ask what white bread like her was doing here. He did wonder about the accent. Alabama, maybe?
“Heard your radio, that’s how I knew you were home. Had myself a batch of cornbread all but ready to go when it came to me I didn’t have a single egg, not a one. Any chance—”
“Sorry. There’s a Korean grocer half a block up.”
“Thanks….Think I could come in?”
Driver stepped aside.
“I like to know my neighbors.”
“You’re probably in the wrong place for that.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. I have a history of bad choices. A downright talent for them.”
“Can I get you something? I think there may be a beer or two left in the fridge—what you’d probably call the icebox.”
“Why would I call it that?”
“I thought—”
“Some of that coffee I smelled would be great, actually.”
Driver went into the kitchen, poured two mugs, brought them back.
“Kind of a strange place to live,” she said.
“L.A.?”
“Here, I meant.”
“I guess.”
“Guy below me’s always peeking out his door when I come in. Apartment next to me, their TV’s going twenty-four hours a day. Spanish channel. Salsa, soap operas with half the characters getting killed and the rest screaming, godawful comedy shows with fat men in pink suits.”
“See you’re fitting right in.”
She laughed. They sat quietly sipping coffee, chattering on about nothing in particular. Driver hadn’t developed the capacity for small talk, could never see the point of it. Nor had he ever had much sensitivity to what others were feeling. But now he found himself talking openly about his parents and sensing, in his momentary companion, some deep pain that might never be lessened.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said at length. “For the conversation even more. But I’m fading fast.”
“Stamina’s the first thing to go.”
They walked together to the door. That long, narrow hand came out again, and he took it.
“I’m in 2-G. I work nights, so I’m home all day. Maybe you’ll come by sometime.”
She waited and, when he said nothing, turned and walked away down the hall. Hips and rear end a marvel in her jeans. Growing ever smaller in the distance. Carrying that pain and sadness back with her to the lair where it, and she, lived.
Second job he ever drove on, everything went wrong that could. Guys had passed themselves off as pros. They weren’t.
The mark was a pawn shop out towards Santa Monica, near the airport, by a couple of buildings that put you in mind of old time computer punch cards. Shop wasn’t much to look at if you went in the front door, the usual accordions, bikes, stereos, jewelry and junk. All the good stuff went in and out the back door. The money to pay the toll on that back door was stashed in a safe so old that Doc Holliday could have kept his dental tools in it.
They didn’t need any accordions or jewelry. Money in that safe was another thing.
He was driving a Ford Galaxie. Right off the line this thing had more power than made any kind of sense, and he’d been seriously under the hood. From an alley alongside, he watched the principals, two of whom he figured as brothers, head towards the pawn shop. Minutes later, he heard the shots, like whip cracks. One. Two. Three. Then a sound like a cannon going off and a window blowing out somewhere. When he felt a load hit the car behind him, without even looking to see, he peeled out. Half a dozen blocks away, cops pulled in hard behind, two cars at first, then three, but they didn’t have much chance against the Galaxie or the route he’d mapped out—not to mention his driving—and he soon lost them. When it was all over he discovered he’d got away with two of the three principals.
Fucker pulled a shotgun on us, you believe it? A fuckin’ shotgun.
One of the presumed brothers they’d left behind, shot dead or dying on the pawn shop floor.
They’d also left the fuckin’ money behind.
