Drive

by James Sallis

  He was still thinking What the fuck? when Blanche came barreling out with the bag of money and threw it onto the new back seat.

  Drive!

  Drive he did, pulling out in a brake-accelerator skid between a FedEx truck and a Volvo with a couple dozen dolls on the shelf by the rear windshield and a license plate that read Urthship2, not at all surprised to find the Chevy wheeling in behind him as he watched Urthship2 crash-land into the sidewalk bins of a secondhand book-and-records store.

  Air would be thin up there for Urthship2, the new world’s natives hostile.

  The Chevy stayed with them for a long time—the guy was that good—as Blanche sat beside him hauling money by the handful out of the gym bag, shaking her head and going Shit! Oh shit!

  The suburbs saved them, just as they saved so many others from the city’s damning influence. Finding his way to the subdivision he’d scouted earlier, Driver barreled onto a quiet residential street, tapping the brakes once, again, then again, so that by the time he reached the speed trap he was cruising a steady, sure twenty-five. Not knowing the area and not wanting to lose them, the Chevy had come charging in. Driver watched in the rear view mirror as local cops pulled it over. Squad pulled up at an angle behind, motorcycle mountie in front. Guys would be telling this story back at the station for weeks.

  Shit, Blanche said beside him. There’s a lot more money here than there oughta be. Has to be close to a quarter of a million. Oh shit!

  Chapter Eight

  As a kid, new to town, he’d hung around the studio lots. So did a bunch of others, all ages, all types. But it wasn’t the stars in their limos or supporting players arriving in Mercedes and BMWs he was interested in, it was the guys who sailed in on Harleys, muscle cars and jacked-up pickups. As always he stayed quiet, hung back, kept his ear to the ground. A shadow. Before long he’d heard word of a bar and grill these guys favored in the grungiest part of old Hollywood, and started hanging out there instead. Some time in the second week, two or three in the afternoon, he looked up to see Shannon settling in at one end of the bar. The barkeep greeted him by name and had a beer and shot in front of him damned near before he sat down.

  Shannon had a first name no one used. It got listed on credits, nether end of the scroll; that was about it. Up from somewhere in the South, hill country, everyone said. The Scots-Irish ancestry of so many of those hill folk showed in Shannon’s features, complexion and voice. But what he most looked like was your typical redneck from Alabama.

  He was the best stunt driver in the business.

  “Keep ’em coming,” Shannon told the barkeep.

  “You need to tell me that?”

  He’d sucked three mugs dry and thrown back as many shots of well bourbon by the time Driver worked up courage enough to approach him. Stopped with the fourth shot glass on the way to his mouth as Driver stood there.

  “Help you with something, kid?”

  A kid not much older (he was thinking) than those streaming home from school now in buses, cars and limos.

  “Thought maybe I could buy you a drink or two.”

  “You did, did you?” He went ahead and tossed the shot back, set the glass gently on the bar. “Soles of your shoes are mostly gone. Clothes don’t look much better, and I’d wager that backpack holds damn near everything you own. Been some time since you and water touched base. Plus you probably haven’t eaten in a day or two. Am I on track here?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “But you want to buy me a drink.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You’ll do just fine here in L.A.,” Shannon said, gulping a third of his beer. Signaled the barkeep, who was there instantly.

  “Give this young man whatever he wants to drink, Eddie. And have the kitchen send out a burger, double fries, coleslaw.”

  “Got it.” Scribbling on an order pad, Danny tore off the top sheet and clipped it with a wooden clothes pin to a hoop he then spun towards the kitchen. A hand back there reached for it. Driver said a beer would be fine.

  “What do you want from me, boy?”

  “My name’s—”

  “Hard as it may be for you to believe this, I don’t give a flying fuck what your name is.”

  “I’m from—”

  “And I care even less about that.”

  “Tough audience.”

  “Audiences are. That’s their nature.”

  Danny was there with food not long after, never a long turnaround, places like this. He set the platter down before Shannon, who inclined his head towards Driver.

  “For the kid. I, on the other hand, could use another couple soldiers.”

  The plate slid his way and Driver tucked in, thanking them both. The bun was soggy with grease from the burger, fries crisp on the outside and meaty beneath, coleslaw creamy and sweet. Shannon nursed his beer this time. While the shot stood patiently by, waiting.

  “How long have you been out here, boy?”

  “Better part of a month, I guess. Hard to keep track.”

  “This the first square meal you’ve had in that time?”

  “I had some money, to start with. It didn’t last long.”

  “Never does. In this city more than most.” He allowed himself a measured sip of bourbon. “Tomorrow, the next day, you’re going to be every bit as hungry as you were ten minutes ago. What are you gonna do then? Roll tourists on Sunset for the few dollars they have on them and traveler’s checks you won’t be able to cash? Hit convenience stores, maybe? We’ve got career professionals for that.”

  “I’m good with cars.”

  “Well then, there you go. Good mechanic can get a job anywhere, anytime.”

  Not that he couldn’t do that, Driver told him. He was damned near as good under the hood as he was behind the wheel. But what he did best, what he did better than just about anyone else was, he drove.

  Finishing off his shot, Shannon laughed.

  “Been a long time since I took to remembering how that felt,” he said. “Feeling so full of yourself, so confident. Thinking you can eat the world. You really that sure of yourself, kid?”

  Driver nodded.

  “Good. You want any kind of life out here, you even expect to survive, not get eaten up, used up, you damn well better be.”

  Shannon finished his beer, settled the tab, and asked if Driver’d care to come along. Dipping into the six-pack Shannon had bought off Eddie, they drove for a half-hour or so before Shannon nosed the Camaro over a low ridge and down a slope into a system of drainage canals.

  Driver looked about. A landscape not all that different, really, from the Sonoran desert where, in Mr. Smith’s ancient Ford truck, he’d taught himself to drive. Bare flatland ringed by culvert walls, an array of shopping carts, garbage bags, tires and small appliances not unlike the random saguaro, scrub and cholla he’d learned to maneuver about.

  Shannon pulled up and stepped out of the car, left the motor running. Last couple of beers dangled in their plastic web from his hand.

  “Here’s your chance, kid. Show me what you have.”

  So he did.

  Afterwards they went for Mexican food to a place on Sepulveda the size of a train boxcar where everyone, waitress, busboy, cook, seemed to be family. They all knew him, and Shannon spoke to them in what Driver later discovered was perfect idiomatic Spanish. He and Shannon had a couple of scotches to start, chips and salsa, a blistering caldo, green enchiladas. By the end of the meal, several Pacificos having passed by on parade, Driver was fairly wiped.

  That morning he woke up on Shannon’s couch, where he lived for the next four months. Two days later he had his first job, a fairly standard chase scene in a low-end cop show. Script had him hitting a corner, taking it on two wheels, coming back down—simple, straightforward stuff. But just as he pulled into the turn Driver saw what could be done here. Swinging in closer to the wall, he dropped those airborne wheels onto the wall. Looked like he’d left the ground and was driving horizontally.

  “Holy
shit!” the second-unit director was heard to say. “For God’s sake print that—now!”

  A reputation was being born.

  Standing in the shadow of one of the trailers, Shannon smiled. That’s my boy. He was working a top-grade movie four stages over, swung by on a break to see how the kid was doing.

  The kid was doing all right. The kid was still doing all right ten months later when, on a perfectly routine call, a stunt the like of which he’d done a hundred times, Shannon’s car went over the edge of the canyon he was speeding along and, cameras rolling, catching the whole thing, plunged a hundred yards straight down, somersaulted twice, and sat rocking on its back like a beetle.

  Chapter Nine

  “I’m gonna run across and grab something to eat,” Blanche said. “I saw a Pizza Hut over there and I’m starved. Sausage and extra cheese okay?”

  “Sure,” he said, standing near the door, by one of those picture windows on aluminum tracks that all motels seem to have. The lower left corner had sprung out of the frame and he could feel warm air from outside pouring in. They were in a second-floor room facing front, with only the balcony, stairway and twenty yards or so of parking lot between them and the interstate. The motel itself had three separate exits. One ramp onto the interstate was off the intersection beyond the parking lot. Another was just up the street.

  First thing you do, room, bar, restaurant, town or crib, is check and memorize the ways out.

  Earlier, road weary, bodies vibrating from far too many hours in the car, they’d watched a movie on TV, a caper film set in Mexico with an actor who’d been big for about three days before sinking into drugs, guest-star gigs in films like this one shot on the cheap, and the meager, trailing fame of tabloid headlines.

  Driver marveled at the power of our collective dreams. Everything gone to hell, the two of them become running dogs, and what do they do? They sit there watching a movie. Couple of chase scenes, Driver’d be willing to swear it was Shannon driving. Never saw him, of course. But definitely his style.

  Has to be Blanche, Driver thought, standing by the window. No other way that Chevy was down there in the parking lot.

  She’d taken a brush out of her purse and started into the bathroom.

  He heard her say “What—”

  Then the dull boom of the shotgun.

  Driver went in around Blanche’s body, saw the man in the window, then slipped in blood and slammed into the shower stall, shattering the glass door and ripping his arm open. The man still struggled to free himself. But now he was lifting the gun again and swinging it towards Driver, who, without thinking, picked up a piece of the jagged glass and threw. It hit the man full on in the forehead. Pink flesh flowered there, blood poured into the man’s eyes, and he dropped the shotgun. Driver saw the razor by the sink. He used it.

  The other one was doing his best to kick the door in. That’s what Driver had been hearing all along without realizing what it was, that dull drumming sound. He broke through just as Driver came back into the room—just in time for the shotgun’s second load. Thing was maybe twenty inches long and it kicked like a son of a bitch, doing more damage to his arm. Driver could see flesh and muscle and bone in there.

  Not that he was complaining, mind you.

  999

  Sitting with his back against the wall in a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, Driver watched blood lapping toward him. Traffic sounds rolled in from the interstate. Someone wept in the next room. He realized he’d been holding his breath, listening for sirens, for the sound of people gathering on stairways or down in the parking lot, for the scramble of feet beyond the door, and took a deep draw of room air gone foul with the smell of blood, urine, feces, cordite, fear.

  Neon flashed on the skin of the tall, pale man near the door.

  He heard the drip of the tub’s faucet from the bathroom.

  He heard something else as well, a scratching, a scrabbling, more drumlike sounds. Realized at length that it was his own arm jumping involuntarily, knuckles rapping at the floor, fingers scratching and thumping as the hand contracted.

  The arm hung there, apart from him, unconnected, like an abandoned shoe. When Driver willed it to move, nothing happened.

  Worry about that later.

  He looked back at the open door. Maybe that’s it, Driver thought. Maybe no one else is coming, maybe it’s over. Maybe, for now, three bodies are enough.

  Chapter Ten

  After four months at Shannon’s he’d put away enough money to move out to his own place, an apartment complex in old east Hollywood. The check Driver wrote for deposit and rent was the first he’d written in his life and among the last. Soon enough he learned to operate on cash, stay off the radar, leave as few footprints as possible. “Good God, we’re in a Forties movie,” Shannon said when he saw the place. “Which apartment’s Marlowe live in?” Except that, these days, sitting out on the plank-like balcony, one heard far more Spanish than English.

  He’d been coming up the stairs when the door next to his opened and a woman asked, in perfect English but with the unmistakable lilt of a native Spanish speaker, if he needed any help.

  Seeing her, a Latina roughly his age, hair like a raven’s wing, eyes alight, he wished to hell he did need help. But what he had in his arms was about everything he owned.

  “How about a beer, then?” she asked when he admitted to it. “Help you recover from all that heavy lifting.”

  “That, I could do.”

  “Good. I’m Irina. Come over whenever you’re ready. I’ll leave the door ajar.”

  Minutes later, he stepped into her apartment, a mirror image, really, of his own. Soft music playing in three-quarter time, something with accordion fills and frequent appearances of the word corazon. Driver remembered once hearing a jazz musician claim that waltz time was the closest thing to the rhythm of the human heart. Sitting on a couch identical to his though considerably cleaner and more worn, Irina watched a soap opera on one of the Spanish-language TV channels. Novellas, they called them. They were huge.

  “Beer on the table here, you want it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Settling onto the couch beside her, he smelled her perfume, smelled the morning’s soap and shampoo and the smell of her body beneath, subtler and solider at the same time.

  “New in town?” she asked.

  “Been here a few months. Staying with a friend till now.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Tucson.”

  Expecting the usual remarks about cowboys, he was surprised when she said, “I’ve got a couple of uncles and their families living out there. South Tucson, I think they call it? Haven’t seen them in years.”

  “That’s a world apart, South Tucson.”

  “Like L.A. isn’t?”

  It was for him.

  How much more for her?

  Or for this child that came staggering sleepily out of the bedroom.

  “Yours?” he said.

  “These tend to come with the apartment. Place is overrun with roaches and children. Probably want to check your closets, look under kitchen counters.”

  She stood, scooped the child up on one arm.

  “This is Benicio.”

  “I’m four,” the boy said.

  “And very stubborn about going to bed.”

  “How old are you?” Benicio asked.

  “Good question. Okay if I call my mom, check in with her about this?”

  “Meanwhile,” Irina said, “we’ll get you a cookie and a glass of milk out in the kitchen.”

  Minutes later, they returned.

  “Well?” Benicio said.

  “Twenty, I’m afraid,” Driver told him. He wasn’t, but that’s what he was telling the world.

  “Old.” Just as he’d suspected.

  “Sorry. Maybe we can still be friends, though?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Your mother’s alive?” Irina asked once she’d tucked the boy back in.

  Easier to say no
than to explain it all.

  She told him she was sorry, and moments later asked what he did for a living.

  “You first.”

  “Here in the promised land? A three-star career. Mondays through Fridays I waitress at a Salvadoran restaurant on Broadway for minimum wage plus tips—tips from people little better off than myself. Three nights a week I do maid service for homes and apartments in Brentwood. Weekends I sweep and vacuum office buildings. Your turn.”

  “I’m in the movies.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “I’m a driver.”

  “Like for limos, right?”

  “A stunt driver.”

  “You mean all those car chases and stuff?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Wow. You must get paid good for that.”

  “Not really. But it’s steady work.”

  Driver told her how Shannon had taken him under wing, taught him what he needed to know, got him his first jobs.

  “You’re lucky to have someone like that in your life. I never did.”

  “What about Benicio’s father?”

  “We were married for about ten minutes. His name is Standard Guzman. First time I met him I asked, ‘Well, is there a deluxe Guzman somewhere around?’ and he just looked at me, didn’t get it at all.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Lately he’s been into charity work, helping provide jobs for state workers.”

  Driver was lost. Seeing his expression, she added: “He’s inside.”

  “Prison, you mean?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “How long?”

  “Be out next month.”

  On TV, beneath the looming, half-exposed breasts of his blonde assistant, a stubby dark guy in a silver lamé frock coat performed parlor magic. Balls between upturned cups appeared and vanished, cards leapt from the deck, doves flapped up from chafing pans.