Drive (9 page)
Authors: James Sallis
Bernie Rose and Isaiah Paolozzi grew up in Brooklyn, the old Italian section centering around Henry Street. From the roof where Bernie had spent a good portion of his teen years you could look left to the Statue of Liberty and, right, to the bridge like a huge elastic band holding two distinct worlds together. In Bernie’s time, those worlds had become ever less distinct as skyrocketing rents in Manhattan drove young people across the river, and Brooklyn rents, on the teeter-totter, rose to meet the demand. Manhattan, after all, was still but minutes away by F train. In Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and lower Park Slope, trendy restaurants catering to the new residents sat jarringly among cluttered used-furniture stores and ancient, flyblown, hole-in-the-wall bodegas.
It was a part of town where stories about the mob circulated like the latest jokes.
One of the new residents, out walking her dog, had let it crap on the sidewalk and, in a hurry to meet her date, failed to clean up after it. Unfortunately the sidewalk fronted the home of a mobster’s mother. Days later the young woman came back across the river to find the dog gutted in her bathtub.
Another, circling block after block seeking a parking place, had pulled into one just vacated. “Hey, you can’t park there, that’s a private spot,” a kid on the stoop shouted to him. “No such thing,” he’d said. Next day when he hiked the eight blocks to pull his car to the other side to make room for street cleaning and so avoid a ticket, it was gone. He never saw it again.
Back around 1990, Nino’d got fed up. “This ain’t my town anymore,” he told Bernie. “How’s California sound?” Sounded pretty good. Not much for Bernie to do here; the business ran itself. He was bone tired of old men waving him over to their dinner and domino tables to complain, tired of the slew of cousins and nephews and nieces that comprised most of Brooklyn. And he’d drunk enough espresso to last him a lifetime. Had his last cup, in fact, the day they left. Never touched it again.
Hadn’t taken Nino long to pull up ties. Sold the restaurant with its red-flocked wallpaper and big-hair waitresses to one of the newcomers with plans to make it a “sushi palace.” Laid off the news stand and new chi-chi coffee houses to a couple of nephews. Uncle Lucius, urged on by wife Louise, who wanted him out of the house whatever the cost, took over the bar.
They drove cross-country in Nino’s cherry and cherry-red Cadillac, pulling into truck stops a couple times a day for hamburgers and steaks, making do the rest of the time with chips, Vienna sausages, sardines, Fritos. Before this, those few times they had reason to venture into it, even Manhattan seemed a foreign country. Brooklyn was the world. Now here they were, coursing through the wilderness of America, traversing its back lots.
“Hell of a country,” Nino said, “hell of a country. Anything’s possible, anything at all.”
Well, yeah. You had family, connections, money, sure it was. Little difference between this and the political machines that spat out all those Kennedys and kept the like of Mayor Daley in office. Or the ones that chocked Reagan and a couple of Bushes under the wheels of the republic while tires got changed.
“Even if it does look,” Nino added—they were in Arizona by then—“like God squatted down here, farted, and lit a match to it.”
Nino stole home in their new world as though he’d always been here, taking command of an array of pizza parlors, mall-based fast food concessions, bookie action, enforcement. It was just like they’d never left, Bernie thought, only now when they looked out they didn’t see elevated train tracks and painted ads for restaurants on the side of buildings, they saw blue sky and palm trees.
Bernie Rose hated it all. Hated the procession of beautiful days, hated giving up seasons and rain, hated the clotted streets and highways, hated all these so-called communities, Bel Air, Brentwood, Santa Monica, insisting on sovereignty even as they drained away L.A.’s resources.
He’d never thought of himself as a political person, but hey.
Thing was, it made him a kinder man. He went out on a collection to a doublewide or a co-op some idiot had paid two mill for, that kindness went with him. He tried to understand, tried to put himself in the others’ shoes. “You’re going soft, boy,” Uncle Ivan said—the only person back east he kept in touch with. But he wasn’t. He was just seeing how some people never had half a fucking chance and never would have.
In China Belle, well into his third cup of green tea, nibbling at the edges of an egg roll too hot to eat, Bernie sat thinking about the guy who’d set sights on Nino.
“Everything all right, Mr. Rose?” his favorite waitress, Mai June, asked. (“My father owned little aside from his sense of humor, of which he was inordinately proud,” she’d told him when he asked about her name.) Like everything she said, even so phatic a statement, with its lilt and rising tones, sounded like a poem or a piece of music. He assured her the food was exemplary as always. Moments later, she brought his entrée, five-flavor shrimp.
Okay. Run it down, then.
Nino out here in Wonderland had begun fancying himself some kind of goddamn producer, no longer just a good maintenance man (and he’d been one of the best), but a mover and shaker. Such unwarranted ambition was in the very water and air, and in this pounding sunlight. Like a virus, it got into you and wouldn’t let go, dog of the American Dream gone dingo. So Nino’d set up the grab, or more likely had it foisted on him, then farmed it out, probably to the foister. Director put a team together, a package. Brought in the driver.
Shouldn’t be too hard to step in those footprints. Not that he knew offhand who to call, but there’d be no problem getting numbers. He’d put it out that he was a mover and shaker himself, of course, one with a heavy job waiting on the runway, only before takeoff he needed the best driver to be had.
Mai June materialized beside him, refilling his tea cup, asking if he needed anything else.
“Brave shrimp,” he said. “Heroic shrimp.”
Bowing her head, Mai June withdrew.
999
As Bernie Rose chomped egg rolls and five-flavor shrimp, Driver was approaching the Lexus where it sat in the empty lot next door. Thing had an onboard alarm system that hadn’t been activated.
A black-and-white swung by, slowed momentarily. Driver leaned back against the hood as if it were his own ride, heard the crackle of the radio. The cruiser went on.
Driver straightened and moved to the window of the Lexus.
Steering wheel crossed with a Club—but Driver had no use for the car, and it took him less than a minute to slimjim the door. The interior was spotless. Seats clean and empty. Nothing on the floorboards. A scant handful of refuse, drink cup, tissues, ballpoint pen, tucked neatly into a leatherette pocket hanging off the dash.
Registration in the glove compartment gave him what he wanted.
Bernard Wolfe Rosenwald.
Residing at one of those woodland names out in Culver City, probably some apartment complex with a half-assed security gate.
Driver taped one of the pizza coupons to the steering wheel. He’d drawn a happy face on it.
His eyes went up, to plastic IV bags hanging on trees above the bed, six of them. Below those a battery of pumps. They’d need to be reset every hour or so. One beeped in alarm already.
“What, another goddamn visitor?”
Driver had spoken with the charge nurse, who told him there’d been no other visitors. She also told him his friend was dying.
Doc raised a hand to point shakily to the IVs.
“See I’ve reached the magic number.”
“What?”
“Back in med school we always said you have six chest tubes, six IVs, it’s all over. You got to that point, all the rest’s just dancing.”
“You’re going to be fine.”
“Fine’s a town I don’t even visit anymore.”
“Is there anyone I can call?” Driver asked.
Doc made scribbling motions on air. There was a clipboard on the table. Driver handed it to him.
“This is an L.A. number, right?”
Doc nodded. “My daughter.”
At a bank of pay phones in the lobby, Driver dialed the number.
Thank you for calling. Your call is important to us. Please leave a message.
He said that he was calling from Phoenix, that her father was seriously ill. He left the name of the hospital and his own phone number.
When he got back, a Spanish-language soap opera was playing. A handsome, shirtless young man came struggling up out of swampland, plucking leeches off well-muscled legs.
“No answer,” Driver said. “I left a message.”
“She won’t call back.”
“Maybe she will.”
“Why should she?”
“Because she’s your daughter?”
Doc shook his head.
“How’d you find me?”
“I went by your place. Miss Dickinson was outside, and when I opened the door she rushed in. You two had a routine. If she was there, then you should be. I started knocking on doors, asking around. A kid across the street told me paramedics had come and taken you away.”
“You feed Miss Dickinson?”
“I did.”
“Bitch has us all well trained.”
“Is there anything I can do for you, Doc?”
His eyes went to the window. He shook his head.
“I figured you could use this,” Driver said, handing him a flask. “I’ll try your daughter again.”
“No reason to.”
“Okay if I come back to see you?”
Doc tilted the flask to drink, then lowered it.
“Won’t be much reason for that, either.”
Driver was almost to the door when Doc called out: “How’s that arm?”
“The arm’s good.”
“So was I,” Doc said. “So was I.”
This son of a bitch was beginning to piss him off.
Bernie Rose came out of China Belle picking his teeth. He tossed the fortune cookie in the Dumpster. Even if the damn thing held the gospel truth, who in his right mind would want to know?
Ripping the coupon off his steering wheel, he balled it up and sent it after the fortune cookie.
Pizza. Right.
Bernie drove home, to Culver City, not far from the old MGM studios, now Sony-Columbia. Jesus, one hand wrapped around a hamburger, held two fingers of the other up to his head in greeting, then hit the button to open the gate. Bernie gave him a thumbs-up in reply, wondering if Jesus knew he’d just passed a good facsimile of the Boy Scout salute.
Someone had shoved over a dozen pizza ads under his door. Pizza Hut, Mother’s, Papa John’s, Joe’s Chicago Style, Pizza Inn, Rome Village, Hunky-Dory Quick Ital, The Pie Place. Son of a bitch probably went around pulling them off doors all over the neighborhood. On every one of them he’d circled Free Delivery.
Bernie poured a scotch and sank into the swayback sofa. Right alongside was a chair he’d paid over a thousand dollars for, supposed to correct all your back problems, but he couldn’t stand the damn thing, felt like he was sitting in a catcher’s mitt. So, though he’d had it almost a year, it still smelled like new car. The smell, he liked.
Suddenly he felt tired.
And the couple next door were at it again. He sat listening and had another scotch before he went and knocked at 2-D.
“Yeah?”
Lenny was a short, red-faced man who’d carry his baby fat with him to the grave.
“Bernie Rose, next apartment over.”
“I know, I know. What’s up? I’m kind of busy here.”
“I heard.”
His eyes changed. He tried to close the door but Bernie had reached up and grasped the edge, forearm flat against it. Guy got even more red-faced trying to shove it closed, but Bernie held it easily. Muscles on his arm stood out like cables.
After a moment he swept it open.
“What the—”
“You all right, Shonda?” Bernie asked.
She nodded without meeting his eyes. At least it hadn’t gotten to the physical stage this time. Not yet.
“You can’t—”
Bernie clamped a hand on his neighbor’s throat.
“I’m a patient man, Lenny, not much for getting in other people’s way. What I figure is, we’ve all got our own lives, right? And the right to be left alone. So I sit over there for almost a year now listening to what goes down in here and I keep thinking, Hey, he’s a mensch, he’ll work it out. You gonna work it out, Lenny?”
Bernie rocked his hand at the wrist, causing his neighbor’s head to nod.
“Shonda’s a good woman. You’re lucky to have her, lucky she’s put up with you this long. Lucky I’ve put up with you. She has good reason: she loves you. I don’t have any reason at all.”
Well, that was stupid, Bernie thought as he returned to his own apartment and poured another scotch.
It was quiet next door. The swayback couch welcomed him, as it always did.
Had he left the TV on? He didn’t recall ever turning it on at all, but there it was, unspooling one of those court shows currently fashionable, Judge Somebody-or-another, judges reduced to caricature (brusque, sarcastic New Yorker, Texan with accent thick as cake icing), participants either so stupid they jumped at the chance to broadcast their stupidity nationwide or so oblivious they had no idea that’s what they were doing.
Yet another thing that made Bernie tired.
He didn’t know. Had he changed, or had the world changed around him? Some days he barely recognized it. Like he’d been dropped off in a spaceship and was only going through the motions, trying to fit in, doing his best imitation of someone who belonged down here. Everything had gone so cheap and gaudy and hollow. Buy a table these days, what you got was an eighth of an inch of pine pressed onto plywood. Spend $1200 for a chair, you couldn’t sit in the damn thing.
Bernie’d known his share of burnouts, guys who started wondering just what it was they were doing and why any of it mattered. Mostly they disappeared not long after. Got sent up for lifetime hauls, got sloppy and killed by someone they’d braced, got taken down by their own people. Bernie didn’t think he was a burnout. This driver for damn sure wasn’t.
Pizza. He hated fucking pizza.
Come right down to it, though, that was pretty funny, all those pizza ads stuck under his door.
