Double Solitaire

by Craig Nova

  “Hi,” she said. The knob of the door of Black’s was hot enough to make popcorn.

  “Hi,” he said, looking down and away.

  “Getting hot, huh?”

  She put a hand through her thick hair, and her scent suggested she hadn’t had a shower in a couple of days.

  “Which way are you going?” she said.

  “East.”

  “Away from LA,” she said. “That’s for the best I guess.”

  She had her hands in her pockets and glanced up the road, which now began to shimmer in the heat, and the mirages there, those lakes of silver, began to reflect the mountains in the distance, which seemed Martian.

  The woman behind the counter said, “Credit card or cash?”

  “Cash,” Farrell said.

  Farrell put the precise amount on the counter, down to the penny. Was that a mistake? Wasn’t it more likely that someone would remember a man who had quarters, dimes, nickels?

  He kept his face down.

  “That woman outside wants a ride,” said the cashier. “I’d leave her alone.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Call it woman’s intuition,” said the cashier. “Good luck. A lot of hot, empty country where you’re going.” She looked out the window at the blacktop that ran into the desert. “You want a water bag?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned,” she said.

  On the porch the hair of the woman was so tangled it was beginning to look like dreads.

  “Everything come out all right?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “All cleaned up? Hands washed?”

  The woman stood up. She was tall and very thin. Meth for sure, he thought. She obviously had something to offer, to tell, to say, and Farrell was willing to bet it was more intricate than the stories of most women who end up on the front porch of a desert store that was getting ready to go under. Soon, a BP would take over with a mini-mart and microwave burritos. No lunch counter with burgers and fries.

  “Can you do me a favor?” she said.

  “I’m in a hurry,” he said.

  “I won’t slow you down. And I don’t take up much space,” said the woman.

  “Look . . .”

  “No, you look,” she said. She stepped closer, and brought him into her fragrance. “Don’t you want me to be nice?”

  “Sure,” he said. He kept his face toward the distant mountains. “But I’m in a h-h-hurry . . .”

  “Me, too,” said the woman. “That gives us something in common. And why do you keep looking away. Don’t you want me to remember you?”

  The air still had some dust that the car had brought up to the pumps. A fragrance of the desert lingered, like a desiccant that would leach moisture out of any living thing it touched. The door of the Camry opened with a reassuring click, the precision of the engineering, the nature of the metal seeming at odds with the desolation of the store, the landscape, the porch. The steering wheel was already hot, and the key in the ignition was, too. He wasn’t even surprised, really, when the woman from the porch opened the passenger’s door and got in.

  “Look,” he said.

  “My name is Ellen.”

  “Ellen,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sort of nice, don’t you think, like a farm wife?”

  He didn’t want to stare, but the pistol she had was a .38, snub nosed, a revolver, some of the bluing gone, although the hammer was pulled back.

  “You know,” he said. “I’ve never been carjacked before.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” she said. “And, you know, a last time, too.”

  “You mean like getting killed,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “At least you aren’t stupid. Yeah. There’s a last time, too.”

  “You don’t know what you’re getting into,” he said. “I’d like to warn you. I really would.”

  “You’re warning me,” she said. “What have you been smoking?”

  “I could just sit here. And wait you out. That is, I could make you shoot me right here, and I don’t think you want to do that.”

  “No,” she said. “I want you to drive me for a while.”

  “But if I don’t,” he said. “You’ve got to shoot me. Or get out. They both have dangers.”

  “You know,” she said. “You don’t rattle very easily, do you? Most guys start sweating bullets in circumstances like this. What do you do for a living?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Start the engine,” she said.

  He thought what she would look like if he just let her have the car, and she got stopped by the cops. When they opened the trunk, she’d say, “Oh, That. That. Well. Let me explain . . .”

  Too bad the car was registered to him.

  “I think you are making a m-m-mistake,” he said.

  “Funny,” she said. “Mostly the guys I deal with say just do this, take off your panties, and I promise you everything will be all right . . . but you don’t do that. What gives?”

  “I’ve got five hundred dollars in cash,” he said.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  It was folded over in the front pocket of his shirt so there would be no need to open a wallet where a driver’s license was visible. He reached the money with two fingers, took it out, and passed it over.

  “That’s a lot of meth,” he said.

  “Not for me,” she said. “Start the car. Drive.”

  “Where?” he said.

  “Into the desert. I don’t care where, really. I just got to think a little.”

  “I was considering the Yarrow Ravine,” he said.

  “Where the rattlesnakes are? What were you going up there for?”

  “A picnic,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Where’s your basket?”

  He took one of the energy bars from his pocket.

  “Everything is smaller these days,” he said. “Even picnics. I just walk around, think things over, you know, take a little walkabout.”

  “Go on,” said Ellen. “You know what? I should shoot that place up, Black’s. They wouldn’t even let me use the bathroom. Because I didn’t buy something. So, fuck them.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Well?” she said. “Are we going to settle this here or are we going to take a drive? And you don’t want a picnic. You want privacy. So, we have something in common, right?”

  “So how did you end up sitting on a porch?”

  “Wow,” she said. “You must be a cop or something. Get them talking, right? Isn’t that what the hostage negotiators do?”

  “I’m not a cop,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I bet you’re something worse.”

  He glanced at the pistol and thought, Oh, my dear Ellen, have you made a mistake.

  The road was just two-lane blacktop, but the car still left a cloud of dust behind, as though it was vanishing into the dry, vicious air of the desert.

  Ellen looked in the glove box, but only found the owner’s manual, registration, which she looked at for a moment, still keeping that pistol in her lap, and said, “Laurel Canyon. So, what are you, a movie star?”

  “No.”

  She picked up the iPad, turned it on, pulled up the pictures. Catherine, Jack, Ann, Gerry.

  “Who are these?” she said.

  “Kids,” he said.

  “They aren’t looking too good,” she said. “A little sickly.”

  He looked right into her eyes.

  “Jesus,” she said. “What’s with that look? Why if I didn’t know better, I’d be afraid.”

  She turned off the iPad and put it away.

  It wouldn’t be good for her to take the car, since when it ran out of gas, he thought, or she left it someplace, the trunk was going to be opened. And it wouldn’t be good to have any trouble with her anyplace where someone might call the cops. It wouldn’t be good if she lef
t him at the side of the road where someone might ask what the hell he was doing on a road in the Mojave Desert. Where was justice, that long dismissed item?

  “Something smells a little funny,” she said.

  “We must have passed something d-d-dead at the side of the road.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

  “So, where do you want to go?” he said. “Maybe we can work something out?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Like what?”

  “The first thing you can do is to put the hammer down on that,” he said. He gestured to the pistol. “And when you do, point it out the window.”

  She put it down.

  “Don’t think I won’t use it,” she said. “Don’t think it for a minute. So, what’s eating at you?”

  “Me?” he said. “Nothing.”

  “Tell me another.” She swallowed. “You’re heartsick.”

  “I didn’t know I had one,” he said.

  “Don’t be cute,” she said. “I’ve had it up to here with cute.”

  The desert landscape slipped by, so gray and brown, so flat, so desolate as to make the occasional Joshua tree look good. Or vital.

  “I’m trying to come up with a way that you don’t have to use that pistol, you get where you want to go, and I keep my car. You’ve got five hundred dollars.”

  “That’s a start,” she said.

  “Here,” he said. The pillbox sat in his hand, the one with Botticelli’s Venus on it. She opened it, took a Klonopin, and swallowed it dry.

  “So,” she said. “You sound like you are selling me a life insurance policy.”

  If you only knew.

  “I do have a problem,” he said.

  “I believe you,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I do.” She handled the pistol. “Have we met before?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “So, what do you want? No lies. That’s the ground rule.”

  She stared straight ahead.

  “I bet you do all right with women,” she said.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “I’d fuck you right now.”

  “Before you kill me?” he said. “Sort of a black widow?”

  “I guess that would depend,” she said. She laughed at the notion.

  “How did you come to be sitting on that porch back there?”

  “Lying men, cheap bosses, women who pretended to be friends and weren’t, and some screwy ideas about coming to California. The oldest story there is. Does that do it? I mean, what are the odds I had in Plymouth, New Hampshire?”

  “Better than this,” he said.

  “I’m trying to figure that out,” she said.

  That desert landscape, so dry, so threatening, slid by.

  “I got to take a leak,” she said. “Black wouldn’t let me use the bathroom. Like I had some venereal disease I was going to leave on the toilet.”

  “I’ll stop farther up,” he said. “You can take the keys and go back into the bushes away from the road.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “So, tell me,” he said.

  “You really have a nice voice, you know that?” she said.

  If I could just live up to it, he thought.

  “I grew up in New Hampshire,” she said. “I was young. Sixteen. I looked good. I came out here and I thought I was going to get in the movies. How fucking dumb. You know, girls still think that, or did fifteen years ago. How old do you think I am?”

  He thought she looked forty, but he said, “Thirty-five.”

  “Thirty,” she said. “Life out here can be hard.”

  She glanced over at him.

  “So, you know what?” she said. “I couldn’t get anywhere. Nowhere. Until I met a young actor, you know, he had some parts, and I let him sleep with me and then I threatened him with going to the cops, since I was sixteen. That’s all he needed. A rape charge.”

  “I guess that happens,” he said.

  “Not as many charges as there should be,” she said.

  I’m with you there, he thought.

  “So, you know what happened?” said Ellen.

  He drove through that landscape, which was an off-brown, marked by gullies and plants that looked like they should be dead but through some miracle weren’t.

  “S-s-some guy showed up, right?” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Ellen. “And when he was done with me, I was lucky not to be in jail.”

  “All in hints about what might happen, right?” he said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “But I had some fun. You know, parties, and I even got flown to Europe, Paris, you ever been to Paris? Why, I drank champagne, watched the dawn from a bridge over the Seine. It was a good time. But soon, I was charging money.”

  “A girl’s got to eat,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Ellen. “But you meet some people that aren’t the kind you want to bring home to mom and dad.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “It sort of spirals down,” said Ellen. “It was the Russians who scared me. That’s why I was on that porch. I just want to get back to New Hampshire.”

  “They were getting ready to hire you out as a dump girl,” he said. “Right?”

  Ellen closed her eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Paid to be beaten. What are you, psychic?”

  “No,” he said.

  “So, what are we going to do?” she said.

  “I’ve got a problem. If you take this car, you are going to have a problem, too.”

  “So?” she said.

  “Open the glove box. There’s a little door at the top. Open it.”

  She reached in, pulled it down. Five thousand dollars fell out.

  “Consider this your lucky day,” he said. “Take it.”

  She sat for a while with the money in her lap. Then she flipped the edge of the bills, like someone playing with a deck of cards. The Martian landscape rolled by.

  “I got to pee,” she said.

  The Camry stopped in a cloud of dust on the shoulder of the desert.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  She took the keys from the ignition, put them her pocket, and took the money, too. The door opened and the sage-scented air of the desert came in.

  “Do it in front of the car,” she said. “I’ll be right over there.”

  She walked to the side of the road and then into that scrub. Outside, in that dust, it was possible that a buzzing rattle would begin as she squatted in the half shade of a Joshua tree. That’s all he needed. But only the hissing of the wind came from the brush. There were dying languages of native people that had a windy sibilance . . . the sound of wind moving across sand.

  He pretended to pee in front of the hood, then reached down, took the extra key, and got in the car, locked the doors, started the engine and took off, running it up to seventy-five. In the rearview Ellen stood at the side of the road. Then she turned toward the scrub and threw the pistol into it, the thing twirling like some awkward, extinct bird. She stood at the side of the road, as still as a mannequin. She must have thought, What the fuck had happened?

  Someone would pick her up, and she could keep going east. That was the best thing. New Hampshire, Vermont, Upstate New York . . . maybe she’d have a chance. You dumb fucking Santa Claus, he thought. It gave him some relief not to have to think about how Terry would have used Ellen, years ago, if he had had the chance.

  People always talk about rebirth as a pleasant thing, but what if it isn’t, what if it is a kind of horror? You have to consider where you have been.

  The desert air appeared in that ominous shimmer, that quivering sky that had a suggestion of all the heat of error, of folly, of delusion, of everything he had turned against but was unsure how to avoid. The black birds, like checks in the sky, circled in that silver so keen and shiny as to seem more icy than hot. Sure, tell me about rebirth, he thought.

  Yarrow Ravine was about ten miles along the road. The sign at the turn l
ooked as though it had been sandblasted so that the letters on it, above the cartoon of a rattlesnake, appeared to be fading, and so was the yellow background that now looked like jaundiced fog. The sign read: RATTLESNAKE PRESERVE. DO NOT TANTALIZE THE SNAKES.

  People still came here to see a snake or to catch one even though it was illegal, but mostly people left this part of the desert alone. The road wasn’t that different from some of the others off the blacktop, just a dirt track with arroyos and scrub, mountains in the distance. The Camry left a long cloud of dust, as though it were some kind of exhaust from a locomotive. Even with the dust, the stink still came into the car. The heat, or maybe it was just the sun pounding on the trunk of the car, made the odor worse. The road went straight for four or five miles, and it kept going until it got to the foothills with their long, tornado-shaped gullies that began at the top of a hill as a little seam but that got wider, more funnel-like and deeper as they went downhill.

  Every now and then, as hard as it was to believe, a cloudburst took place here, and then the desert bloomed, green as jade and more vital, too, but it didn’t last long. At the end of that long straight section of road, it turned to the left, toward a divide between one set of foothills and another, and in the space between them some willows grew, or what looked like willows.

  If Shirushi was right, the more cunning, the more thinking that went into this, the worse it would be for the man who paid the price for what happened to the British girl. Mostly, though, he could depend on that repetitive, anonymous, indistinct landscape, the dirt itself seeming venomous, and, in fact, it was, if you were out here long enough without water. The sun that had been high when he had been at the store was beginning to move to the west. The right place would have absolutely no path, no sign of anyone walking, no trail markers, nothing. Or, with one keen marker. One telltale mark on the landscape. A Joshua tree with a blaze, a rock that looked like Abraham Lincoln’s nose. . . .