The Driver

by Hart Hanson

  “Cats.”

  “I have a vague memory of a skate park,” Lucky said. “Perhaps you could . . . ?” Lucky tapped on Ripple’s phone. Ripple extended his middle finger at Lucky, then hunched over, using all his bony fingers on his phone, like a touch typist, instead of one meaty index-finger jab at a time, the way I do it.

  “Eucalyptus Skate Plaza,” Ripple said. “Inglewood and 120th.”

  Because we were crawling along in traffic, Ripple took the time to inform us that the park had originally been named after Mayor Larry Guidi.

  “Until Larry stole city property and got charged with felony theft,” Ripple said.

  “What did Larry steal?”

  “A rusted-out, broken-down, twenty-quart cement mixer. But that was enough to rename the park Eucalyptus Skate Plaza.”

  I dumped out of the 405 southbound traffic at Manchester onto La Cienega to hit the surface streets.

  “Perhaps we’d do better with a Fresh Start tomorrow?” Lucky suggested.

  “If you’re hungry, just say so,” Ripple said.

  “I am Extremely Hungry,” Lucky said. “I suggested A New Day only because it will be dark in less than an hour.”

  “Mayor Larry’s skate park has lights and stays open until nine P.M.”

  “What if that setting sun on the map isn’t there to tell us it’s the west?” I asked. “What if it’s there to tell us to be there at sunset?”

  LAX slid by on the right; the 105 slid by overhead; we crossed Imperial Highway, passed a county courthouse, some apartment buildings, and a low-slung office building and crossed into a residential area.

  “Left on 120th,” Ripple said, glued to his phone.

  We were in an area of house-proud one- and two-bedroom bungalows, reasonably late-model cars sheltered under carports, and older cars parked on the street.

  “End of the street, straight ahead,” Ripple said.

  I pulled over two car lengths from the intersection of 121st and Inglewood beside a house with a tall, red, wooden fence. I turned off the Transit and we regarded the skate park through the windshield, the light angling down behind us while palm trees swayed in the breeze that rises as the sun goes down.

  There were half a dozen young skateboarders in Larry’s park: three boys, two unknowns, one girl. They were goofing around on the rails and ledges, intimidated, while older kids skated around the concrete bowls, trying not to collide with BMX bicycles.

  “What’s the plan?” Lucky asked.

  “When one of these kids leaves, we’ll follow him.”

  “To a cat refuge?”

  “Wait, which kid will we follow?”

  “Avila was fifteen, sixteen when he had pink hair. So forget all the little kids.”

  I had my eye on a boy and a girl, early high school age, the boy a skater, the girl a BMXer, both of whom left the fenced-in and supervised skate park to smoke cigarettes in the church parking lot next door.

  “I’m starving,” Ripple said.

  “It’s all the THC in your system,” Lucky said disapprovingly.

  “Fine,” I said, “I’ll stay here and watch while you two find a drive-through and—”

  The lights in the skate park went on. The groms clapped but the boy and the girl I’d marked earlier obviously considered the lights a kind of signal and headed off together, directly away from us, across the grass, southeast across the park.

  “Bogeys on the move,” I said. “I’ll follow them on foot, keep you apprised by cell phone; you guys station yourselves up ahead, out of sight.”

  I jumped out of the car and set off after them because I didn’t want a debate.

  Once off the grass on the other side of the park, the skater slammed down his board and hung on to his cyclist friend’s saddle as she pedaled down a street, duplexes on one side and an apartment building on the other. They took a left at the next intersection, keeping to the sidewalk.

  “East on Broadway,” I said into my phone.

  “We are ahead of you,” Lucky said, “because the circle of civets is drawn to the east of the skateboarding little girl on the Map of Shit.”

  I saw the Transit was already parked ahead of the boy and the girl up on Hawthorne Boulevard.

  They turned south again, both walking now, talking intently about something, though I couldn’t make out distinct words.

  They left the road and headed along a railway easement.

  “Train tracks,” I muttered into my phone.

  They balanced along the rails, then shrunk into the deepening shadows against a graffiti-covered board fence, lighting cigarettes out of range of the streetlights thirty yards to the west.

  Negatory. The smell was not tobacco.

  Then they started making out.

  I worried that my bogeys might hunker down for sex and drugs, but they disengaged and kept moving along a footpath beside the tracks, passing the joint back and forth, then jaywalked across Hawthorne. Lucky had guessed right again; the Transit was parked in a near-deserted parking area a block to the south.

  “Your phone tell you what that dark building is?” I asked Ripple.

  “It’s a mall,” Ripple said.

  “Pretty damned depressed mall.”

  “It’s abandoned.”

  “The whole mall is deserted?”

  “Condemned and restricted. No public access.”

  Ahead of me, now on the north side of the tracks along the south end of the deserted mall, the bogeys finished the remainder of the joint, the skater ate the last soggy bit, and the biker clambered up a frost fence with barbed wire at the top and executed an impressive flip to land on her feet on the other side. The boy tossed his skateboard over, which the girl caught, then threw her bike—the girl ran from the bike instead of catching it, and the two of them doubled over in laughter, mellow and high, until the boy used the same technique as the girl to flip over the fence. Arms around each other’s waists, they melted into the darkness between the deserted mall and a looming parking garage, destitute and deserted.

  “Guard,” Lucky warned me.

  I pressed up against a concrete abutment across the track from the fence surrounding the mall. The guard was approaching from Hawthorne, but he was inside the fence, walking the perimeter. When he aimed his flashlight into the shadowed area between the parking structure and the mall, the bogeys were nowhere to be seen: nothing but weeds and detritus and crap and litter.

  And a dozen pairs of red eyes staring at him before slipping away, first to shadow, then to nothing.

  “Cats,” I said into my phone. “Lots of cats.”

  “What now?” Lucky asked.

  “I’ll come to you.”

  I trotted along the railway back to well-lit Hawthorne, turned left, and got into the Transit with Lucky and Ripple.

  “There’s a ten-foot fence,” I said, “barbed wire at the top.”

  “No razor wire?”

  “Just rusty, dull stuff, easy to get over if you’re wearing a jacket or a hoodie.”

  “I’m wearing a hoodie,” Ripple said.

  I explained that it wasn’t exactly set up for the physically challenged.

  “Wait, I know it’s a pain, but don’t make me stay in the car.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  Lucky had a tiny flashlight, but we figured if he used it the security guard would see us.

  “The skaters come here when the lights go on at the skate park because they had to sneak in Under Cover of Darkness,” Lucky said. “We must do the same.”

  I’ll spare you the Jackass images of us getting Ripple down the train tracks and over the barbed wire while avoiding (in the following order) a train, three curious homeless people, a thousand feral cats, two security guards, and finally (I shit you not) a group of Satanists conducting a cat-sacrifice ritual on a spray-p
ainted pentagram in the basement of the abandoned parking garage.

  When Lucky ran at them, this solemn, occult gathering yelped and cursed and ran, stumbling over their stupid black robes, made from sheets or Halloween costumes, piling into somebody’s mom’s minivan, and screeched away, leaving behind a dead cat and a dozen burning black candles.

  “Creep me out or what?” Ripple said.

  “Terrible,” Lucky said.

  “We’ll check back on the way out. If they’re here, we’ll sacrifice them to Satan and see how they like it.”

  “Avila must have driven in here the way they did,” Lucky said.

  We wound our way up the stairs to the second-highest level of the parking structure, where the chasm between us and the mall was spanned by three concrete pedestrian ramps. The ramps were obstructed by twenty-foot chain-link fences bolted to the concrete. In order to get around the barricade, it would be necessary to swing out over the thirty-foot abyss.

  Of course a slightly stoned daredevil skater kid wouldn’t think twice about the danger. Ripple offered to go first, maintaining that he wasn’t afraid either.

  “Because you have no legs,” Lucky said, “you are high, and you have remarkable upper body strength.”

  “Avila came here alone with barrels,” I said. “Assuming he either rolled them or brought a dolly, how’d he cross?”

  We checked the barricades again, risking Lucky’s flashlight.

  One of them had been cut along the sides, and the bottom could be lifted like a large flap, far enough even for Ripple to get through in his wheelchair. After that, we simply crossed the concrete ramp to the mall the way thousands of shoppers had back in the early nineties when the place was a going commercial concern and the parking lot was used for parking, not sacrificing cats to the Dark Lord.

  A trot around the eastern and southern sides of the mall (the northern and western sides were on busy, well-lit streets) confirmed that all of the entrances were welded shut. There was graffiti everywhere, graffiti on graffiti, some political (OBAMARAMA), some sexual (ANAL ROOLZ!), some existential (LIFE IS DA SHITZ), and some religious (JESUS SAVES AT BANK OF AMERICA).

  “Now what?” Ripple asked. “Pound on a door until someone lets us in?”

  I suggested that we station ourselves up against a dark wall at the southern end of the mall, where we could keep an eye on the entire eastern expanse of the mall and wait for a regular to show us the way.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, a figure approached along the nearest pedestrian walkway, swung out over the chasm and back onto the ramp like a gibbon, and headed away from us along the outside of the mall.

  “I’ll go,” said Lucky.

  He disappeared into the shadows like an Afghan cat and returned five minutes later to lead us along the outside of the mall, passing two sets of welded doors before shining his flashlight on a mural-size rendering of a demon with his mouth wide open. Over the demon was a slogan in bloodred paint.

  “‘We Are All Made of Dirt,’” Ripple read.

  Lucky, grinning, thrust his arm in and out of the demon’s mouth to show that it was not, in fact, painted black, but was an actual hole leading into the mall.

  We folded Ripple’s wheelchair and Lucky muscled it through the demon’s mouth while I played St. Christopher and carried baby Jesus Ripple through on my back. Lucky felt the need to tell me that he disagreed with the demon: “We are not all made of dirt. We are Divine in Origin.”

  “Just because you go through a doorway doesn’t mean you agree with what’s written above it,” I said. “Work doesn’t set you free. Disneyland isn’t actually the happiest place on earth, and half the time I go through a door it’s labeled NO ENTRY.”

  Once inside and past a glut of refuse and clutter, we stood a moment to let our eyes adjust.

  Light pollution dribbled in from holes in the roof, enough to reveal a dim, rambling expanse of space marked by concrete columns and steel beams and treacherous holes in the floor meant for escalators and stairways or viewing galleries where shoppers could lean over and see what people were buying on the next level down.

  And everywhere, the feathery shadows of cats, the smell of cat piss, dull red eyes watching us from the shadows.

  “Hear that?” Lucky asked.

  Yes. Music and hoots of derision or admiration from somewhere to the left, to the south.

  Firelight flickered up from the main concourse beneath us.

  Away from the walls and pillars, the concrete floor was surprisingly clear and Ripple demanded to be put back in his chair so he could roll himself. When we reached the fire hole, he gave me the heebie-jeebies by rolling right up to the edge so that he could look down to where thirty or more kids stood around a two-story plywood vertical ramp extending from the second floor down to the basement and back up again—utilizing what must once have been the food court.

  The whole postapocalyptic, adolescent festival was lit by an array of hissing camp lanterns, heavy-duty flashlights, candles, a smoky barrel fire, traffic flares, and multiple strings of Christmas and Halloween lights rigged to a couple of car batteries.

  “I hope when we get back to the Transit,” Lucky said, reading my mind, “that there is still a battery in it.”

  “This is awesome,” Ripple said.

  Lucky made a near-silent whistle sound to get my attention and pointed.

  The ends of the ramp were held in place by barrels. A dozen to sixteen per side. Ballast, to keep the ramp from shifting no matter how vigorous, fat, or numerous the skaters.

  “They must pay the guard to look the other way,” Lucky whispered.

  “I’m guessing they pay him off in cheeba,” Ripple said, indicating the haze of smoke heading toward holes chopped in the roof.

  “Let’s say howdy,” I said.

  As we descended the long-frozen escalator, me bumping Ripple down in his wheelchair, it seemed like the kids all saw us at the exact same time, concerned but not fearful, like a flock of birds seeing a cat who can’t get at them. Lots of jerking chins.

  I counted six under age fifteen—including the young couple who’d unwittingly led us here—maybe a dozen over eighteen, the rest in between, two boys for every girl, black kids, a few white kids, brown kids, fewer Asians, but the vast majority was a mix, undefinable, the future.

  “The fuck?”

  “You cops?”

  “Stupid! Cops don’t have no handicaps.”

  “They sure as fuck didn’t come to skate.”

  Lucky explained that before he lost his legs in Afghanistan, Ripple had been a serious skater. He’d read about this place online and wanted to come and see it, and we, his friends from work, had brought him to check it out.

  Ripple nodded, playing his part.

  “You get blown up?” one girl said, swaddled in Balkan military surplus, tilting back her head so she could regard Ripple from beneath her mirror aviators.

  “Shot by a sniper,” Ripple said, indicating his right leg. “Run over by a tank,” indicating his left.

  “Can I touch?” she asked, indicating Ripple’s right stump, visible in the leg of his cargo shorts. She said it in a frankly sexual manner, which Ripple did not miss.

  “Come and get it,” he said.

  And she did. But at the last moment she deked and reached way up for the much shorter left stump.

  I looked at Lucky. He shrugged. The girl was obviously legal, over eighteen, pretty if a little dirty, tattoos on all the skin we could see, all up her arms and chest, her neck, and up into her hairline.

  Freaky girl. None of which mattered to Ripple if the grin on his face was any indication as she groped him.

  “All righty, then,” said one heavily pierced young man, his earlobes stretched out and elongated by wooden disks. “It’s good to be kind to our returning veterans.”

  The rest
of the kids shrugged us off and drifted away to do what they’d been doing when we arrived. Skating. Screwing in the shadows. Smoking dope. Eating mushrooms. Taking pills. Telling each other stories.

  “Did it hurt?” the girl asked Ripple, finally pulling her hand out of his pants.

  “What’s your name?” Ripple asked.

  “Kink.” (Very apt.)

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Fuck-you is my real name. What’s your name?”

  “Ripple.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Darren.”

  She started laughing at that, but Ripple reached down to scratch the stump of his leg, which shut her up immediately, the way a spark of fire stops an arsonist dead.

  Lucky muttered, “What is happening?”

  “You okay here?” I asked Ripple.

  He looked at me like I was nuts.

  “Because if you are,” I continued, “then me and Lucky will take a look around, check back with you later,” at which point Ripple understood that I was being a good wingman.

  “Later,” he said.

  “If I sit on your lap, will you take me for a ride?” Kink asked.

  Ripple agreed that might be fun for both of them.

  It took a lot less time to find Avila’s barrels than you’d think: all but two of the many barrels stabilizing the ends of the vertical ramp were open, full of rubble, rebar, broken chunks of masonry, bricks, and garbage. Only two were welded shut.

  Lucky removed the filler plug from one of the barrels and leaned over, flashlight pressed up to one eye, to look inside the barrel.

  “Yes,” he said, replacing the plug. “How do we get them out of here?”

  “We don’t,” I said. “We tell Keet where they are and let him worry about it.”

  We headed back to where we’d left Ripple with the amputee fetishist, only to find half a dozen mall-rat skater kids rolling Ripple and Kink, both in his wheelchair, Kink straddling Ripple, up and down the vert ramp.

  “He looks pretty happy,” Lucky said.

  At which point Kink grabbed Ripple’s face and stuck her pierced tongue down his throat.

  “Let’s give him a minute,” I said.