The Drive

by Tyler Keevil

  Seeing that, Venus grinned. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Beatrice used the remote to start the movie. The MGM lion appeared on the screen, roaring and snarling. Sprite looked up, her ears stiff, and didn’t relax until the lion faded to black. Venus had wanted to do the Pink Floyd thing, and watch the film while playing Dark Side of the Moon, but Bea had insisted that my first viewing experience be a pure one.

  ‘It’s hard to believe you’ve never seen this, Trev.’

  ‘I know – it’s weird.’

  At the same time, it was one of those stories that I already seemed to know, somehow. Maybe from hearing about it so much, or seeing clips of it. Either way, it was exactly what I expected it to be: Dorothy and her journey, the yellow brick road, her magic red slippers, the various obstacles she faces, and the characters she meets.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that the guy from before?’

  We were at the bit where she first comes across the Tin Man, all rusted up.

  ‘Obviously,’ Venus said. ‘Shhh.’

  Until then, I hadn’t understood that most of the people from back in Kansas – like her bitch of a neighbour, and those helpful farmers – are the same actors that turn up in Oz as the witch and the wizard and her three companions. They all appear as reflections of themselves.

  The whole thing was a lot more subtle than I’d imagined.

  chapter 60

  A pelican swooped in over the creek, dipped a wing to pinwheel, and dived straight down – spearing into the water and disappearing. When it resurfaced it had a fish in its gullet. I was watching from Bea’s back deck, leaning on the railing. I’d woken up early and come outside to hack a morning dart. In the pre-dawn stillness the creek was as cool and pristine as an ice rink. There was no breeze, no traffic, no people. I was feeling calmer, and almost composed. On Bea’s sofa, I’d had a full night’s sleep for the first time in weeks.

  As I stood there, soaking up the serenity, I heard a strange sound behind me. I looked back. Sprite and Belle were lying together just inside the deck doors. Sprite was suckling one of Belle’s teats – nursing off her like a kitten. It was fairly unsettling.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  Sprite paused and looked up at me, as if to say, What does it look like I’m doing? Then she went right back to it.

  Beyond them, I saw movement in the kitchen. Somebody was up.

  ‘Beatrice?’

  ‘In here. I’m making fruit salad.’

  ‘You’ve got to see this.’

  She came out carrying a big knife and wearing an apron over her pyjamas, which were decorated with pictures of She-Ra, in various poses. Bea had a rolled, unlit cigarette behind her ear. Seeing the animals, she stopped and put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll be darned.’

  ‘But Belle isn’t lactating, is she?’

  ‘I’ve heard it can happen. Or maybe Sprite just needs comforting.’

  ‘She’s too old for that.’

  ‘Guess it’s a case of arrested development.’

  Bea went back into the kitchen, and I heard the steady staccato rap of knife against chopping board. Sprite kept on nursing, eyes half-closed, totally blissed out.

  ‘Watch her, Belle,’ I said. ‘She’ll suck you dry if she can.’

  Belle lifted her head up, gave a bear-snort, and lay back down. She could handle it.

  I went over to shut the deck doors.

  Blades of grass prickled my neck. I lay on my back, staring up at a stonewashed sky. After breakfast they’d taken me down to Golden Gate Park, and we’d ended up in this Japanese tea garden near the centre. The grounds contained paths and ponds and rock gardens and bonsai trees and pagodas. There were a lot of tourists wandering around, but we’d managed to find a secluded spot near one of the ponds to get baked.

  Beside me, Bea dipped her hand in the pond, scooped up a palmful of water, and let it trickle through her fingers. Then she flicked the last drops in my face, as if casting a spell.

  ‘Speak,’ she said. ‘Play me a memory.’

  ‘This reminds me of Amsterdam,’ I said.

  I told them about the trip Zuzska and I had taken there. I told them that she and I had gotten stoned in a pot café and collapsed next to one of the canals. I told them how she’d laid her head in my lap, and how I’d been stroking her hair, feeling it hot and silky with sunlight.

  I told them what she’d said, too.

  ‘She claimed these were the things we’d remember. Not the big moments, but the in-between moments. And I guess she was right, since I do.’

  ‘Boo-hoo,’ Venus said. ‘Enough with the broken-hearted sonata.’

  ‘Venus, be nice,’ Bea said.

  ‘I’m just saying. If you guys had problems, you had them for a reason.’

  ‘It might help if I knew what that reason was.’

  Bea sat up. She had bits of grass in her hair, like green tinsel.

  ‘Maybe we should ask the I Ching.’

  Venus groaned. ‘Please, no.’

  ‘What’s the I Ching?’

  Bea was already rooting through her purse. She brought out a pocket book the size of a cigarette case, and a set of coins – these three bronze coins with holes in the centre. She told me that the I Ching was a fortune-telling system, like the Chinese version of Tarot cards.

  ‘You flip the coins six times,’ she said, tossing them in the air to demonstrate. They bounced and settled in the grass. ‘Then use them to build a hexagram – a sequence of lines.’

  ‘And it works?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s total bullshit,’ Venus said.

  ‘It never works for Venus because she’s a sceptic.’ Bea picked the coins up one at a time, and held them out to me. ‘But if you believe me, and trust your unconscious, it works.’

  ‘I believe,’ I said, and took the coins.

  ‘I’ll guide you through it.’

  Venus snorted and started rolling another joint. Bea and I sat cross-legged, facing each other. She spread her scarf on the grass between us, like a miniature picnic blanket.

  Bea said, ‘What do you want to ask?’

  ‘Why she did it, I guess. Why she cheated on me.’

  Bea got me to toss the coins on the scarf. She had a pen and an old shopping receipt to write on. She told me that one side of the coins had a certain value, and the other side had another value. You added the values up to create part of the hexagram. I didn’t really get it but she seemed to know what she was doing. She counted my coins and drew a line on her paper. I had to toss the coins five more times, and she drew five more lines, and that was it.

  ‘This is very portentous,’ Bea said. She sat back and put her fingertips together, steeple-like, playing up her part as soothsayer. ‘A perfect example of the I Ching in action.’

  ‘Action, my ass,’ Venus muttered.

  ‘The hexagram you made,’ Bea said, brandishing the receipt, ‘is standstill.’

  There was a long pause. I could hear water burbling from a fountain in the pond.

  ‘Is that good?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me check.’

  She flipped through her little book. Venus had sparked up her joint. She leaned over to offer it to me, and I took a huge hit that turned my tongue numb and made my ears pop.

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ Venus whispered. ‘That book is pure hocus pocus.’

  ‘It’s a bit mystical,’ Bea said. ‘But it was good enough for Carl Jung.’

  When I heard that, I choked on the smoke in my lungs and had a huge coughing fit. I waved the joint towards Venus, giving it back, and thumped my chest with a fist like an ape.

  ‘Carl Jung?’ I said.

  ‘The guy who came up with individuation and synchronicity and everything.’

  ‘I know. My hitcher mentioned him.’

  We looked at each other, and I felt the ground shudder, as if a tremor had passed beneath us. Venus was blowing smoke, oblivio
us, but you could tell Bea had felt it too.

  ‘Did you find the meaning of the hex-thing?’ I asked her.

  She nodded, and read out, ‘“It’s a time of stagnation and decline. This hexagram is linked to the eighth month, August, when the year has passed its zenith and decay settles in.”’

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said. ‘It is August!’

  ‘See?’ she said. ‘It’s already working.’

  I gave her a high-five. We started seeing all these parallels between my reading and my situation with Zuzska: how our relationship had stagnated, and decayed, since neither of us was willing to move or emigrate to be with the other.

  ‘All we did was fly back and forth and have sex,’ I said.

  ‘No wonder she cheated on you!’

  ‘Let’s ask it something else.’

  Venus shook her head and flicked her roach in the pond. It landed with a sizzle. A second later a fish snapped it up, thinking it was food. There were various breeds of fish in the ponds – mostly those giant carp with bulging eyes.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ Venus said.

  We said goodbye to her without looking up. We were totally focused on the oracle. Bea rearranged her scarf while I gathered up the coins. The second time, I asked it if what I was doing – running away, the whole road trip idea – was a good plan or a total waste of time. I threw the coins again, and Bea jotted down the lines again. I waited for her to decipher it.

  ‘Hmm,’ Bea said. ‘Youthful folly.’

  ‘Damn.’ I’d started picking blades of grass. ‘That one’s pretty self-explanatory.’

  ‘It’s not all bad. Listen.’ She put her finger on the page, and traced it along the print as she read out, ‘“In a time of youth, folly is not evil. One may succeed in spite of it.”’

  She explained a bit more, emphasising the positives, but you could tell she was just trying to make me feel better. I threw all the grass I’d plucked into the air, like confetti.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a better question: what should I do now?’

  We ran through the coin-tossing and line-drawing ritual a third time. We were leaning together, with our foreheads almost touching. Some of the lines were solid, others broken. She didn’t recognise the next hexagram, and had to look it up in her book.

  ‘It’s deliverance,’ she said.

  ‘Like the film?’

  ‘It can mean getting out of danger, clearing the air, or a release of tension. It says if you have something to do, then do it. If you don’t, then it’s probably time to return home.’

  ‘But I just got here,’ I said.

  ‘Wait. One of your lines is moving. That changes the reading. It means…’ She thumbed to another page, and recited solemnly, ‘“Shoot at the hawk on a high wall.”’

  Neither of us laughed. This seemed fucking serious.

  ‘How do I do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently something – or someone – is standing in the way of your deliverance.’ Bea glanced around, as if the person might be lurking nearby. ‘He must be overcome first.’

  We sat in silence for a while, tripping out about that. A cloud of gnats rose up around us in a frenetic tornado. I saw Venus coming along one of the paths. She had a unique walk – a kind of bow-legged swagger. When she reached us, she spat in the pond and sat down.

  ‘Are you still doing that shit?’

  ‘It says I’m being delivered,’ I said.

  ‘Delivered like a letter?’

  I thought of the hitcher, and his envelope.

  ‘Could be,’ I said.

  chapter 61

  We skimmed over the water like a stone, barely touching the surface. The bay was simmering with waves that juddered against the underside of the hull. You could feel the reverberations in your tailbone and rattling up your spine. Each time we hit a big wave, flecks of sea-spray splashed up from the prow and showered our faces – cool and sweet and exhilarating.

  ‘Yee-haw!’ Bea shouted.

  She was standing in the wheelhouse beside the driver – this beefy Ukrainian guy, built like a tree trunk, with gold teeth and pockmarked cheeks. Venus and I had been consigned to the back, where the passengers were supposed to sit.

  ‘Tao will be there tonight,’ she called across to me. ‘So you’ll know somebody.’

  ‘Tao seemed cool.’

  ‘Tao is cool.’

  We’d decided to go to the party cruise after all. Or Venus had, and she’d convinced Beatrice that it was the best way to celebrate the end of their fast. Since we’d been running late, Bea had ordered a water taxi to take us straight to the pier. In San Francisco there’s a company that does that kind of thing. But it’s not cheap.

  ‘That’s twice as expensive as a regular cab,’ Venus had said.

  ‘It’s also twice as fast, and twice as awesome.’

  It was, too. The guy had navigated his boat right into Mission Creek, and docked at the back of their float home. His taxi wasn’t like those dinky water taxis you see puttering around Vancouver. It was a sleek white speedboat, low and long, with a sheltered seating area and twin 275-horsepower motors. The thing really went. We were torpedoing along about fifty yards from shore, beneath the Bay Bridge, and it felt a little like flying.

  ‘Where you go tonight?’ the driver yelled at Bea.

  ‘A party cruise.’

  ‘Forget cruise. You come with me to our Ukrainian Centre. We do folk dancing.’

  ‘I love folk dancing – but not tonight.’

  Like everybody else, he’d fallen for Beatrice, instantly. In rapid-fire broken English, he started telling her about himself: how he’d fled the Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union, how he’d met his wife in an opium den, how his son was playing baseball for a triple-A team and his daughter was a concert pianist. He was so engrossed with Bea that he wasn’t watching the water at all. A buoy – one of those big triangular ones – was racing towards us.

  ‘Heads up, buddy!’ I shouted.

  He casually swerved around it, throwing up a huge rooster-tail of spray.

  ‘Maybe I should drive,’ Beatrice said.

  ‘You want to drive? You drive.’

  He let her take the wheel, and stood behind her to help her steer. It was always like this with Bea. In Rome, the chief of the polizia had taken her on a personal tour of the city.

  ‘Hold on to your girdles, girls,’ she said, leaning on the throttle.

  ‘You one crazy lady.’

  Me and Venus brooded in the back and stared at the scenery. It was near sunset and the sky above the bay was flamingo-pink, dotted with cotton-candy clouds. On Venus’s side we had a good view of shore. We were skipping along parallel to a sea-wall, past a series of piers that supported waterfront bars and restaurants and amusement arcades and flea markets.

  ‘What part of the city is that?’ I asked Venus.

  ‘The Embarcadero.’

  ‘Looks funky.’

  ‘It’s pretty mainstream.’ She pecked at the window with her nail. The outside of the glass was spattered with beads of saltwater. ‘There are a few okay bars, but most of them are overrun with tourists and straights. Luckily that won’t be the case on the cruise tonight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She grinned. Wickedly. ‘It’ll be a boatload of gays.’

  ‘Oh. Wow.’

  ‘Don’t worry – it’s not exclusive.’

  Further along, Venus started rooting around in her handbag. She pulled out a mickey of rum, and glanced at the front. The driver was still chatting away, distracted by Bea. He’d put on some kind of funky Ukrainian rap, which throbbed through the boat’s sub-woofers.

  ‘Here,’ Venus whispered.

  She offered me the mickey. I went over to join her, and took a quick swig.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘No prob.’

  We handed it back and forth in stoic silence – like two soldiers from warring factions who’d called a temporary truce. Ahead of us,
way across the bay, a fog front was moving in. Amid the haze I could see another bridge, the lights on the uprights glowing like gas lanterns.

  ‘Is that the Golden Gate Bridge?’

  ‘No,’ Venus said. ‘The Richmond Bridge.’

  I was beginning to think the Golden Gate was a myth, like the Golden Fleece. It didn’t actually exist – it was a just a trick they played on tourists to draw them down here.

  ‘Where is the Golden Gate, anyways?’ I asked.

  ‘Around to the west. It connects San Fran to Marin County and Sausalito.’

  I reached for the rum. ‘What do you know about Sausalito?’

  ‘Lots of waterfront property and five-star hotels and rich yuppie pricks. Why?’

  ‘That’s where the hitcher I picked up said he was headed.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Your hitcher.’ She mimed making little quotation marks as she said the name. ‘The brother of the biker.’

  She laughed – this cackling laugh like the wicked witch in Oz. Beatrice looked back, and Venus had to explain what was so funny. Then, of course, the driver wanted to hear all about it: about my imaginary friends and desert hallucinations, about my wingnut road trip and zany experiences. There was a lot of laughing and joking at my expense. I laughed and joked along with them, feeling that rum eating away at my belly.

  The truce was over, obviously.

  chapter 62

  The party ship looked like an old steam ferry, with three levels, two bars and dance floors, and an upper deck open to the sky. Our driver dropped us off right next to it, at a pier on the northeast corner of the city. He gave Beatrice his card, and told her if she called he’d come back to pick us up later.

  ‘Remember,’ he shouted, as he pushed off, ‘you ask for Captain Victor!’

  ‘Aye-aye, captain.’

  To reach the cruise ship, you had to cross this wobbling gangplank. A woman in thigh-highs and fishnets welcomed us aboard and punched our tickets. Then the gangplank went up and the ship’s horn sounded and we chugged out into San Francisco Bay. The decks were packed with people in nautical-themed outfits: pirates and sea gypsies and sailors and various types of marine life. There were also a few hardcores in fetish wear and bondage gear. It was a costume party – which Bea hadn’t known about, and Venus hadn’t bothered to mention.