by Nathan Long
nathan long
night shade books
san francisco
Jane Carver of Waar © 2012 by Nathan Long
This edition of Jane Carver of Waar
© 2012 by Night Shade Books
Cover Illustration by Dave Dorman
Cover design by Rebecca Silvers
Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich
Edited by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-396-0
eISBN: 978-1-59780-409-7
Night Shade Books
http://www.nightshadebooks.com
For my mom and dad,
who never stopped believing in me.
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Years ago I used to go with my friend Anthony Balsley to see this Irish punk band called The Troubles at a bar on Fairfax known as Molly Malone’s. Anthony was a burly, Harley-riding tough guy with a pompadour and a broken nose. We shared a love for rock-a-billy, punk, ska, and all things rowdy and loud.
One night as I was walking toward Molly’s green door, I saw Anthony at the curb comparing Harleys with a big, red-headed biker chick. Anthony is around five eleven, and this girl was a good three inches taller than him and as broad in the shoulder. He introduced her as Jane and me as Nathan, his Hollywood screenwriter pal, and she gave me a disinterested handshake. I didn’t blame her. Next to Anthony I looked as fascinating as a glass of lukewarm water.
Anyway, Jane came in with us and we spent the night singing and drinking along with the band and having a blast. At the end of the evening Jane went home with Anthony and I never saw her again: just another of Anthony’s one night stands. She passed completely out of my mind until last year when I got a strange package at my PO box. It was full of cheap cassettes, numbered one through fifteen, along with a nearly illegible note written on a piece of Motel 6 stationary. This is what it said.
I got yr address from Anthony. Maybe U can make a story out of this. If it makes any $ send half to PO Box ____, Coral Gables, Fla. Don’t try and cheat me about it either. If U do I’ll know and U don’t want that.
J. Carver
I groaned. The writer’s curse is to be constantly approached by well-meaning idiots who say, “Hey man, you’re a writer. I got a great idea for a story. You write it and we’ll split the money,” not realizing that having ideas is less than one percent of the work in writing.
I put off listening to the cassettes for months, but one night the cable was on the fritz and I was feeling too lazy to read a book, so I popped the first tape into an old boom box I’ve had lying around since the ’80s. I didn’t stop listening until I’d finished the last tape at eleven the next morning. Yes, Jane, I thought, I might be able to make some “$” from this.
At first I was tempted to do a total rewrite: tell it in a more traditional style, but every time I tried, it lost the original punch of Jane’s voice and died. In the end I let it stand, doing little more than excising the “ah”s and “um”s and the occasional mispronounced word. I left her colorful and sometimes non-grammatical prose the way I found it. I did rearrange a bit. I’ve spared you most of the “No, wait, I forgot, before that we were already...” stuff and put it all in chronological order.
Jane is remarkably honest in her admissions of her failings, but sometimes I wonder if she isn’t being too modest. She says throughout the tapes how ugly she is. Well, I met her, and though she was no Scarlett Johansson, she was by no means ugly. She had the kind of broad-faced, rugged good looks you associate with frontierswomen and female fire-fighters.
Other than that, the document is what it is. If you choose to think of it as a work of fiction, I’m sure my publishers won’t mind. If you take it as fact, well then, maybe you too will find a cave in the hills one day and have an amazing adventure.
And if you do, send me a tape.
Nathan Long
Hollywood, CA
March 2011
PS. No, her name isn’t really Jane Carver, so don’t go digging in the Coral Gables phone book.
CHAPTER ONE
HUNTED!
I’d just killed a man in Panorama City and the cops were on my trail.
No wait. Let me go back a bit. I’d been having a drink at the Fly By Nightclub, this biker joint just the Panorama City-side of the 405 from Van Nuys airport. Panorama City is nothing but ten square blocks of North Valley strip-mall hell, but I liked the Fly By Night: Merle Haggard and AC/DC on the jukebox, a guy named Mike behind the bar, a couple of pool tables, and signs on the bathroom doors that said Pointers and Setters. Homey, relaxing.
At least it was until this damn fool started trying to get into my jeans. You can’t hate a guy for asking, not the way I look, and sometimes, some days, with the right guy, with the right line of bullshit, I can be mighty obliging. Hell, I’ll even help him with the buttons. But this was the wrong guy, on the wrong day, with entirely the wrong line of bullshit. So I told him, politely, but with a look in my eye that a sober man should have read, no thank you. Well, he didn’t listen, and that you can hate a man for.
He kept piling it on. “Come on, sweetcheeks, who you kiddin’? When you had better’n me? I’ll take you outta this world.”
“Brother, I said no.”
“Damnit girl, you got enough ass for every man in this bar with some left over for seconds. You can’t spare ol’ Dutch a piece?”
I don’t mind telling you my teeth were beginning to set a little on edge. But this being California and the Three Strikes law being in effect, and me having two strikes and a foul tip against me, I put my hands in my pockets and tried to dodge him for the rest of the night.
Some things you just can’t dodge. A little later I went out to the parking lot for a smoke, since you can’t smoke inside in California anymore, not even in a biker bar. The fool followed me out. There I was, sitting on my fat-boy, Baby, smoking what I didn’t know was going to be the last Marlboro of my life, when Digby the Idiot Boy comes up behind me, slides his hand down the back of my jeans, and squeezes my ass.
Now you can say all you want to me. Sticks and stones and all that, but no man, or woman for that matter, puts hands on me without an invitation. It’s not a code or a creed or something I even think about. It just sets me off, and when I get my mad-on the world turns red and hot and Jane isn’t driving the bus anymore. I punched him once. Once.
I swear I was aiming for his face. He just jumped or something. I caught him in the throat instead, a picture perfect kill strike just like they taught me in Airborne Ranger training. It worked. I heard something crack and red spit sprayed out of his mouth. He hit the ground like a pair of empty jeans.
“Fuck.” I knelt beside him, shook him. “Hey, buddy. Hey Dutch.” I checked his pulse, but I knew he was dead. You see it once, it stays with you.
I’m just too fucking big for this world. Any other girl would have hit that guy and maybe bruised his neck a little, or if she was lucky, and really connected, she might have sent him to the hospital. Me, I killed him. A murder rap. My life was over. And just when I was getting things back together.
Somebody was shouting. I looked up. In the parking lot of the 7-Eleven a street guy with a squeegee and a bottle of Windex was pointing at me. “Hey, bitch! Hey! Leave him be! I saw you! You robbin’ him now too?”
Behind him some rich kids standing next to their SUV were staring at me. The girl was tugging on the guy, trying to pull him into the truck, but he waved her off, dialing his cell-phone, all jittery. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m calling the cops.”
People on the street were turning. A couple of guys stepped out of the bar, coming toward me. It just wasn’t going to look like self defense. Not with
the dead guy unarmed and me with my record. I fired up Baby and rode.
***
The cops got the dragnet on me before I made fifteen blocks. Gum-ball lights were flashing down every street I turned on. Pretty quick they had me hemmed in south of Ventura Boulevard, chasing my tail in the twisty suburban hills of Tarzana.
They almost caught me near Winnetka and Wells. I was burning down a side street when a prowler with his lights off roared out of an alley, right on my tail pipe. He was trying to nudge me, which the cops ain’t supposed to do with bikes, but hey, bikers ain’t citizens, right? Two more black and whites cut off the street ahead of me.
I was boxed in but good. There was only one chance. I laid Baby over so flat I shredded my left knee—denim and skin—and fishtailed into a driveway, missing a parked car by a gnat’s ass. I almost ditched when Baby’s back wheel slipped on the front lawn, but I muscled him back under control and gunned it along the side of the house. I heard crunching metal behind me. Guess the cop didn’t have a gnat’s ass to spare.
I barreled into a back yard, ducked a clothesline and swerved to miss a swingset, then rode down a flimsy, white picket fence. I hit an alley and lit out again.
I kept taking the up-turns, hoping to find some little rabbit-run that would take me over the mountains and down onto Highway One where I’d hitch a ride to Mexico and points south. What I found was a dead end, way at the top of Vanalden. Before I had time to turn around and find a better street, I heard the sirens coming up the hill behind me.
I ditched Baby in some yuppie’s kidney-shaped pool. It was a tearful goodbye. I kissed him on the gas cap and lowered him into the deep end without a splash. That bike had taken me back and forth across this country more times than I could remember and had been more faithful than any lover or friend had ever been, even Big Don. Don had died on me, the fucker.
I ran into the scrub and dirt of the Topanga mountains.
With a little luck I might have made it. If a swamp-trash country girl like me couldn’t elude LA flatfoots in the biggest chunk of wild land inside the city, I’d give up all my merit badges. Unfortunately, I don’t have any luck. Never have. They brought dogs. And helicopters.
I nearly pissed myself. Too many episodes of COPS I guess. You know it’s over when they bring the choppers. Two big whirly-birds came up from the valley and started cutting a huge grid pattern over my head. Their searchlights criss-crossed the scrubby hills, turning ’em white as sugar. It looked like the lights at a big Hollywood premier, only upside down. I didn’t want to be the star of this premier.
I ran, splashing through streams so the dogs would lose me, keeping under trees so the choppers wouldn’t see me, but pretty soon those years of Marlboros caught up with me and my lungs felt like some midget with a chainsaw was trying to cut his way out of my chest. The choppers were way off and I couldn’t hear the dogs so I ducked into a thick clump of bushes to catch my breath.
Funny, as soon as I stopped, that dead guy caught up to me. I guess I’d been running so fast my brain had lagged behind like a trailer hitched to a car with a piece of rope. Now that I slowed down that trailer slammed into my brain.
I’d killed a guy! I shook like I had a fever, like his corpse had just wrapped its cold, dead arms around me. That poor slob didn’t have his life anymore because of me. Sure I owed him a punch in the mouth for what he did, but he didn’t deserve to die.
I started to choke up. Then I got mad. How could I feel sorry for some dumb, drunk, grab-ass son-of-a-bitch? Fuck him. Fuck him for not ducking. Fuck him for dying so easy. And most of all, fuck him for ruining my life!
Shit, I was going to cry after all.
Barking bounced off the rocks. The dogs had my scent again. I peeked out. Flashlights were swinging through the trees about twenty yards away. The choppers were turning my way. I guess I could have just stayed where I was and waited for the dogs to find me. I mean, what was I running to anyway? But giving up never occurred to me. Just the idea of being cooped up in prison for the rest of my life made my chest tighten up. I’d done juvie time and county time, but hard time? I’d never survive. I’d rather die right here, swinging and shouting, than be trapped inside four walls for forty years.
I searched around, shaking with panic, looking for a tree, a big rock, anything. A shadow caught my eye up the hill from me. Fifteen feet up was a long, narrow patch of dark, sandwiched between two slanting slabs of rock. A cave? Probably not, but I was all out of options. I scrambled up the slope as fast as my shaking arms and legs could carry me.
It was a cave. I stopped at the entrance even though I could smell the dogs behind me. It was pretty cramped in there, and dark. I don’t like cramped, dark places. Then again, jail is pretty cramped and dark. Still I hemmed and hawed. It was like cutting off my head to stop gangrene from spreading to my body. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go in there.
I heard cop shoes, dogs and radios behind me. Decision made. I dove in.
The tunnel wound up and back, shrinking as it went. I was sweating stink like yesterday’s fish. I clawed my way through the dark, wishing, not for the first time, that I was a flat-chested, no-assed little pipsqueak that nobody ever paid any attention to.
Ten feet in, the entrance disappeared back around a twist in the passage. The light went with it. Pitch black. I couldn’t see forward or back. I could barely turn my head to look. It was tighter than a coffin in there. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. If it hadn’t been for the sound of dogs snuffling behind me I think I might have froze there forever, but the thought of sharp teeth tearing into my ankles got me moving again.
A few feet later the darkness wasn’t so total anymore. Above and ahead I saw a pale green light, or almost saw it. It was so faint it disappeared when you looked right at it. Moonlight? No moon tonight. Street light? Was I coming up in somebody’s basement? Whatever it was, I was all for light. Trapped is bad. Trapped and blind gives me the crawlies.
I followed the ghost light and finally pushed through a keyhole opening halfway up a rock wall. The tightest squeeze yet. I had to get my shoulders in one at a time, and then my tits and hips, but finally I popped out the other side into a low, tent-shaped space with a sandy floor, which I could see ’cause it was lit by a strange glow coming from the far end. It was some kind of gadget, half buried in the sand. I crawled closer. It looked like a little clock. It was silver, with hood-ornament fins curving out from its sides, but where the clock face should have been it had a round, glowing jewel the color of lemonade.
I didn’t get much time to look at it. Suddenly the tiny space was full of barking echoes, ping-ponging off the walls and the inside of my brain. I turned. German Shepherds were squeezing through the keyhole and jumping at me.
I stepped back.
They leaped.
I fell.
My hand touched the glowing silver clock thing.
Somebody hit me with a building. No, it just felt that way, like a giant had grabbed me by the leather jacket and yanked me through a thick velvet curtain, into... where? It was ice cold, and blacker than ten caves. Weird voices were jabbering at me in some gobbledygook I couldn’t understand, and that giant kept yanking at me, harder, and harder, and...
And then I blacked out.
CHAPTER TWO
STRANDED!
I woke up flat on my back with the bed-spins so bad it reminded me of the time in high school my friend Briana made piña coladas with Southern Comfort and we drank two pitchers.
Where was I, anyway? Did the cops put me in a body bag? It felt like it. It was hot, and the air was thick and dusty in my nose. The color above me couldn’t be the sky. It was blue, but the kind of deep blue you get with sapphires or bottles of fancy water... or plastic tarps.
I started to panic. I was weak, but I had to thrash around and let ’em know I wasn’t dead. Being buried alive was right up there with caves and prison in my catalog of claustrophobic no-nos.
Just as I lift
ed my hands to start pushing at the body bag an insect buzzed past my nose, and a fluffy white cloud edged into the corner of my vision. That Ty-D-Bol blue was the sky. What the hell?
I struggled up, rubbing my eyes. Maybe my vision was fucked up. That glowing gem could have damaged... I looked around and seized up like an engine block with sand in the pistons. My eyeballs did a slow right-to-left over the scariest landscape I’d ever seen. Not that there was actually anything outright horrifying about it; as far as visuals went it was pretty easy on the eyes, but, well, let me lay it out.
I was lying on a stone disk the size of a helicopter landing pad, in the middle of a wide prairie of knee high grass with stalks the blue of a junkie’s veins and pointy flowers the size and color of a match flame. Stones stuck up out of the grass, some in straight lines that made me think there must have been a building or a town built around the disk a few centuries back. Beyond the stones, the prairie humped over some low hills to the horizon, where white-capped mountains faded away to purple.
Like I said, pretty. The thing that scared the living piss out of me was that every single piece of it was wrong. All wrong. I couldn’t say exactly how. I ain’t a scientist. But I knew, like you know your red 1987 Ford pick-up from somebody else’s red 1987 Ford pick-up without having to look twice, that I wasn’t on good old terra firma anymore.
The sun was wrong: too big, too orange. The horizon was wrong: it didn’t go far enough away. The plants—I know there are blue plants on earth, but not these plants. Even the air was wrong. It filled my lungs too much. And it smelled off, sharp, like a gun battle in a swimming pool. It wasn’t right, none of it, and it made me shake so hard my teeth rattled.