I kept my speed low and my eye on the rearview. I can’t say I saw nothing suspicious because everything I saw was suspicious: that parked truck, that dog on a rope. But I kept on driving, well within the speed limit, giving every stop sign more respect than it deserved.
Where Selma’s road ended I turned left and smoothed my way around the park, past the ball field and the basketball courts, the unbroken line of backyard walls to my right. This wasn’t an unfamiliar route, I had practiced my departure in earlier visits, but I had never had to drive it when I wasn’t playacting and so this felt completely different. This felt like tiptoeing on eggshells filled with razor blades.
Still I felt a surge of relief roll through me as I approached the end of the park. I checked my rearview again. Nothing chasing, nothing firing bullets into the air. The development’s exit—and my escape—was just down the curving road, and I sped toward it like a horse heading toward the barn, when I spotted something coming at me from the left, charging right at me like a demon from hell.
5. Flamingo Road
THE DARK BLUE car shot through the stop sign, accelerated as if it were leaping, slammed bang into my side.
My hands flew off the wheel as my car flew off the road. Air bags and glass exploded around me, something smashed into my head as the seat belt dug into my neck and the noise of the collision splintered my ears. The car spun and flipped at the same time, spun and flipped and spun…when some son of a bitch slammed into me from the exact other side.
I might have blacked out for a moment, or maybe just closed my eyes as glass and plastic flew all about me, but when I came to, or came to my senses, my car was shockingly upright. To my left was the street and beyond it the park. Directly to my right, peering in through a shattered window, was one of those backyard walls that lined even the interior streets of the development. It was the wall that had kept me from flipping fully over, that wonderful wall. In front of me was the curving road that led to the development’s exit. Behind me was the dark blue car, a stolid sedan, its face now accordioned into the selfsame wall.
Something was stinging my eye and when I wiped at it my hand came away slick and red. Something was ringing in my ear and I couldn’t hear anything else but the ringing. Something was pinching my shoulder and I realized the whole left side of the car had been caved in. Even as I wondered how my luck could be so rotten as to get into an accident while trying to get away from a pack of murderers, I noticed a movement behind me.
My neck screamed in pain as I twisted around and saw a man climb out of the blue car. And reach beneath his loose print shirt. And there was no good intention in his eyes. And like a dolt, I figured out only then that it wasn’t an accident.
The man might have been saying something, too, it seemed like he was, but I couldn’t hear a thing except for the damn ringing.
I pressed the gas to get out of there. Nothing happened, I had stalled. Crap.
I grappled for the keys, found them, tried to turn the ignition. No turn, locked tight. Crap, crap.
In the rearview mirror the man was closer, a gun now magically in his hand. Crap, crap, crap.
I slammed the gear into park, tried the ignition again. Locked still, still, wait, no. I pressed the brake and the key spun and I felt the sweet vibration of the engine turning over.
I eyed the development’s exit, pulled the gearshift down, jammed the gas as hard as I could, and felt my head jerk forward as the car jumped. Backward. A thump and then a smash. The wheels spun uselessly as the car ground further into the car behind me.
I pressed the brakes, put the gear in drive, shot forward. I could feel a scraping from the rear of the car even as I shuddered down the street toward the exit. I expected something to come at me from the side and slam me into another wall. I expected something to rip through my rear windshield. I expected the worst, as if that hadn’t already happened. I tried to check the side-view mirror, but it was gone.
In the rearview mirror I could see something ugly and shapeless smashed up against the smashed-up car. Before I could make any sense of the shape, I hit Flamingo Road.
I barely slowed to make the turn. There was no traffic light, just six lanes directly perpendicular to me, with enough cars whizzing by that there was no way I was hopping across three lanes to take a left. I spun my wheel to the right and somehow the traffic parted for a moment, as if I were the Moses of Flamingo Road, and I slipped right into its stream. The first light I hit was green and when I passed that intersection I let out a breath I had been holding since the collision.
I didn’t drive evasively. I stayed in my lane, let faster cars pass, kept my eye out for anything chasing me, stopped at the lights when I had to, kept driving, driving. That was my getaway strategy. To just keep driving, until I could figure out what to do when I stopped driving. I certainly wasn’t going to stop right there on Flamingo and check out the car; the thing still ran, that was enough, though the going was neither smooth nor speedy. As the ringing in my ears weakened, I could hear the rackety noise of my car bouncing off the walls that bounded the street, the whistles and scrapes, the strange bellyaching roars. People stared at me as if I were atop a parade float as they passed me on the left. I wiped more blood off my face, tried to look like it was an everyday thing for me to drive such a wreck.
A cop approached from the other direction and I maneuvered so that I was hidden from his view by a white van to my left. I didn’t want to have to explain what happened to the car, to Augie, why I left the scene of an accident, who I was or why the hell I was in Vegas. At one point a guy pulled up beside me in a battered Dodge, his windows covered with plastic and the paint mismatched on his doors. He stared over at me. I gave him a thumbs-up, like we were just two guys with bad wheels in the middle of a recession. He smiled back, showing off a bright gap-toothed grin.
When Flamingo Road finally reached the highway, I slid into the left lane and, at the light, took the entrance and headed east. It was a snap decision, I didn’t think it out. I saw the sign for 215 and I chose east because east was where my home was and, like a base runner rounding third as the throw came in from the outfield, home was where I wanted to go. How to get there was the problem.
At highway speed the car shook like a milkshake mixer. I realized I was heading to the airport, and for a moment I felt the calm respite of actually having a plan. Return the car—ignoring the startled stare of the check-in guy when I left the battered Impala in the rental-car line—take the shuttle, check in at a kiosk, find an airport bar, and down a row of something, anything, mixed with vodka while waiting for my plane. It was a plan, sure, sit at the bar like a sitting duck, waiting for a bullheaded man in a loose print shirt to knock-knock on my skull.
A few miles down the highway I saw the signs for the airport exit and I passed them by.
I kept driving, and thinking what to do, what to do, letting my panic get the best of me for a longer time than I’d like to admit. For a few moments I considered skipping airports entirely and driving all the way home. I was more than tempted; it seemed both a lame-brained and romantic notion. Road trip, baby. Twenty-five hundred miles, nothing to it, really. And then I came to my senses. The car would never make it in the shape it was in. And how sweet a target would I be in a wrecked car they could so easily identify?
As I drove through a long stretch of desert I thought maybe I should just ditch the car completely and make my way on foot, hitching rides, keeping completely off the grid. No calls, no credit cards. It would take me a week or so to get home, more maybe, but I’d be completely lost, unreachable by everyone. Including my family. But what if the guy on the phone went after them, how then could I help? And wouldn’t I be flinching at every car that passed, expecting the worst?
My mind was reeling as I headed down toward some sort of bridge. I desperately needed a place to sort it all out. And then I realized with a start that this thing I was crossing was not just any bridge but the goddamn Hoover Dam. On my left was The Narrows of Lak
e Mead, with the art deco intake towers rising out of the water like some evil design by Dr. No. On my right was the huge cement arch.
And in my car, as traffic slowly moved across the narrow rim, I could feel the great dam heave and roll beneath me from the unimaginable pressure of all that water. And I sympathized with the concrete beast. How long had it been holding back the river? As long, it seemed, as I’d been running, not just this one day from Augie’s killers, but for years, for decades, running from my past. Wasn’t the dam tired? Wasn’t it ready just to give it up and let the whole Colorado wash through it?
And where was it coming from, all that water, where was the root of that pressure? The Grand Canyon, of course, which was pretty much right on the way. And I knew then, immediately, that’s where I was headed, too. I was in a hole, the deepest of my life. I needed a place to disappear and figure things out. Where the hell else would I go?
6. The Big Ditch
I NEVER MADE it.
It was dark already when I hit Route 40 at Kingman, and the car’s temperature had spiked precipitously. The Impala and I both needed to cool down. So, instead of the awesome spectacle of the Grand Canyon, I settled for a Motel 6, which, when I came to think on it, considering my situation, was a place far more apt.
I parked what was left of the car in the lot behind the wide, low motel so that it was hidden from the main street. I sat there for a long moment with the engine running and then pulled back, shining my brights on the asphalt. A small puddle of something viscous and dark. My rental car wasn’t going very much farther. I pulled forward again, killed the motor, dragged my briefcase into the motel office, and paid cash for the room. When the clerk asked for identification, I showed him my Nevada license. I didn’t make chitchat with the guy, but when his back was turned to get my key, I snatched a copy of the bus schedule that was in the rack along with pamphlets for the rest of Kingman’s wonderful attractions.
There is little more impersonal in this world than a motel room off the interstate. There is no past, no future, and the present is skeevy enough that you don’t want to look too closely at the bedsheets. My life writ small, with dusty curtains and a sign over the toilet, SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION.
Once in the room, I showered off the last few hours. In the fluorescent bathroom lights I looked green and ill and beyond hideous, but the bleeding wound was above my hairline, which was good. With the cut covered, I could fake normalcy; I had been doing that anyway for the last twenty-five years.
Wrapped now in a towel, I started pacing the room, rubbing my sore neck and trying to come to grips with what just had happened to my life. All the deepest fears that I had been carrying for a quarter of a century had suddenly blossomed true; the past was hunting me, I was on the run, and there was no safe refuge. If I didn’t play it smart, the rest of my life would be an endless stream of foul motel rooms just like this, one after the other. The cheap TVs with remotes that didn’t work, the scent of ammonia and urine, the stained sheets, the stridor of illicit sex banging through the thin walls. I felt bone tired, I felt deep terror, and yet also, quite strangely, I felt the lift of happiness.
Think of the militiaman in his bomb cellar, praying for the apocalypse because he knows how pathetic all his feverish preparations would be if the apocalypse never came. When you prepare for the worst, the worst that can happen is nothing. All my paranoia over the years, all my obsessive planning, turned out to be exactly necessary. Augie and Ben hadn’t taken the same precautions; they had assumed they were safe. Augie was now dead and Ben was in the deep latrine. But I had options. It was if my life had been given a government-approved jolt of meaning.
But there was something else, too, giving me a lift. It was the way I had handled myself through the afternoon’s violence. I hadn’t been able to pull off the gunfight thing—I’m not a torpedo after all—but I had leaped Augie’s back wall pretty damn nimbly. And after the bastard had rammed me into the wall by the park, I had taken care of him all right. Did I intend to put the car in reverse to squash the bastard bloody? I wasn’t sure, it surprised the hell out of me, but reverse it was, even if it was my subconscious pulling the gear. And I certainly didn’t brake after the first thump. The last time I had faced such danger, twenty-five years ago, I had fallen into a pathetic jag of wails and tears, but this time I had risen to the challenge. Over the years I had purposely constricted my life, doing everything I could not to be noticed, not to be too successful, not to achieve all of which I was capable. But suddenly I had an inkling that maybe I was capable enough. Which was good, because I sure as hell would need to be.
It was time to take the next necessary steps. I had turned the cell phone off right after I had called Ben. It was a phone I had bought in an office-supply store with the minutes purchased in bulk. Now I turned it on and booked a Northwest flight from Las Vegas to LA for J.J. Moretti, and paid for it with a credit card in that name, the same card I had used to book my flight to Vegas. Then I lifted the toilet tank and dropped the phone inside to kill it dead. The credit card, I cut into fourths. The card was paid out of a bank account I had maintained with a post office drop box in North Dakota. They could keep what was left in the account. I took my Nevada driver’s license and cut it up as well. In the bathroom, with the fan going, I crumbled up some paper and put it in the sink with the cut-up cards on top, set the whole thing on fire, and watched the last of J.J. Moretti melt and turn black.
Frenchy was dead.
I looked at the bus schedule, found something leaving for Phoenix dead early in the morning. I checked the address of the bus station and got a break: it was just down the road, so I wouldn’t need a cab. Everything was setting up nicely. A bus to Phoenix, a plane to Chicago, another plane ride, purchased separately and leaving the next morning, to Philadelphia. With the five-hour drive south from Philly, I could be home by early afternoon the day after next.
I knew my precautions hadn’t been perfect, there were a thousand details that could have gone wrong, but if the bastards had been waiting for me at Augie’s that meant the secret life I had created for myself must have held through Augie’s torture.
If they were as sharp as I feared, they would glom onto the truth soon enough, but by then, if everything went as planned, I’d be gone again.
I set my alarm to give me plenty of time and then lay down in the bed and closed my eyes. Tomorrow was a big day, tomorrow everything had to go just right. I needed to be rested, I needed to sleep, I needed to prepare.
Tomorrow I would need to start deconstructing my life.
II. MY THREE SUBURBS
“I only just realized it, J.J., but you are the most boring suburban asshole in the world.”
—Augie Iannucci
7. East of Eden
IF YOU WANT to blame it on anybody, the mess I found myself in, you might as well blame it on my father; I always did.
My father left when I was nine. To say he fled would be more honest, but who the hell wants honesty when dealing with family? Certainly not my mother. First my father was on a brief business trip. Then the brief trip turned to a lengthy assignment in another town. Eventually his absence was barely noted as my mother and I ate dinner together in the large, empty dining room, with a pot of flowers placed directly between us so I wouldn’t see all that she was drinking and she wouldn’t see me gagging on her tuna casserole.
My father’s leaving left a hole in my life, but it wasn’t his actual presence that I missed. My father was one of those men whose power was expressed in his absences, an absence of care and concern, an absence of humor, an absence of a personality more dynamic than a cardboard box. My father’s leaving would hardly have been noticed if it wasn’t followed by concomitant losses, losses so dire that I spent the greatest portion of my life thereafter trying to make up for all that vanished when he vanished, too. Think of the kiwi bird haunted by a hawk floating free across the sky—that was me, haunted by what I once had been.
We lived in a big stone house
in a leafy suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line. We had a pool within the gardens in the backyard, a purebred bichon frise named Rex on the leash, and a family membership at the Philadelphia Country Club. My father was a Willing. One of those Willings. It doesn’t mean much in Omaha, admittedly, but being a Willing meant a great deal in the dining room of the Philadelphia Country Club. Old society ladies who had known my great-grandmother used to pat my head as they walked by our table; waiters brought me Cokes and addressed me as Master Willing, sir; mothers pushed their young girls my way. Say hello to Jonathon, sweetie, don’t be shy. I wore a blazer and tan pants in the dining room and I ordered the filet from the adult menu, well done, with french fries, hold the spinach, please.
That was the before.
Much later, my mother told me the details of what happened to all that grandeur. The telling came when I was in college in Wisconsin and had flown down to Florida to watch her die. There was a period between the final operation and her death when she was filled with an unnatural energy, like a sun becoming a supernova before collapsing into a black hole. In those few days she told me more about my history than she had in the entire twenty years that had come before. By then the cancer from her lungs had wrapped like a cobra around her heart and bowels, but her disposition was surprisingly cheerful because she had lost so much weight her figure approximated that of the slim beautiful secretary who had unexpectedly won my father’s heart. Her dreams had been simple before she met my father, typical of the South Philly girl she had been: a modest house in the neighborhood, summers down the shore, maintaining her size four. But when she married a Willing her life exceeded her dreams, and therein lay the seed of my downfall.
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