by James Sallis
In the town of Guadalupe, a small Hispanic and Native American community between Tempe and Phoenix, he found a garage with a spare bay to rent. Mostly, they did customizing-paint jobs, rockers, lifts, your basic muscle-car calls-and he started off catching overflow and stuff the others didn’t want to do. A heads-up to Felix brought in a private job or two, then more. The other mechanics noticed, watched and spread the word, and before he knew it he had more work than he could handle. Gradually he was able to back off the add-on work and concentrate on restorations. He put a couple of classics together, a Hudson and a British roadster, then built a commissioned racer to specs from the ground up. The check from that one got him thinking about other possibilities.
He scouted out a garage with a large storage space that could be turned into an office, in the ramshackle industrial section just south of downtown. Once part of a chain, the place had been abandoned for years, and he got it for next to nothing. Started off buying, refurbishing and selling classic cars. Then, having built up a decent inventory-he wasn’t part of it anymore, and didn’t want to be, but he knew how things worked out there-he built up a rental service to Hollywood studios. They needed a Terraplane or vintage Rolls, Paul West had one, in fine shape and camera-ready.
Paul West also had a secretary and two employees. And Driver wondered sometimes how they were holding out, what they were doing. Maybe they’d figure a way to take over the business, keep it up and running.
Five days pretty much nonstop and he had the Fairlane where he wanted it.
Kind of place it was, the others stayed cool, left him to his work, but they’d been watching.
“Righteous,” a voice said from somewhere above size-10 BKs that came up over the ankles and had so many colors to them they looked like clown puke.
Driver rolled out from under. Short guy, white-whiter than Driver-but he spoke the local Spanish like a native and knew everyone. Family, maybe. Not a regular, but he’d been around.
“You figuring on flying that shit to Mars or what?”
“It needed a little work.”
“A little work’s not what you did, friend. What you did was take Gramma’s sweet ride and turn it into something’s gonna be out there looking for meat six times a day. You could hang a building off that trans, the torque it’ll take now.”
“Maybe I got a little carried away.”
“And carried the wheel base up a notch or two with you, from the look of it. Cut-and-fill?”
“More like hack-and-fill, but yeah, it’ll stay on the ground. Somebody’d already started the job, I finished it.”
“Nose?”
Driver nodded. “Wheels moved forward. Ditched the front suspension for a straight axle, buggy springs.”
“Four-barrel?”
“Right. It’s Seventies. Four-barrel standard, 429 cubes.”
“Smooth. And sweet as cream.” He reached out and patted the car tenderly on the rear fender, the way one would a horse’s flank. The third finger was missing. Rings on all the others. “Looks like the desert and a long moonlight ride’s gonna be whispering in your ear ’bout any day now.”
“Definitely on the list of things that could happen.”
“When it does, you have yourself a good ride, every minute of it.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Best times of your life, just you and the road, leaving all the rest of this shit behind.”
“I hear you.”
The man nodded a half inch or so and walked away.
Were they the best times? In many ways, absolutely. Out there loose and free and moving fast, away from everything that works so hard to hold you in place. Once you had that feeling, once it soaked into your bones, you never got over it, and nothing else ever came close.
But sooner or later, as Manny always reminded him, you had to pull over and get out of the car.
He’d barely got back under when a second set of shoes, pink hightops well-smeared with grease this time, hove into view and didn’t go away. He rolled out. She worked at the far end, by the vertical door that stayed propped open on fifty-gallon drums. Everyone called her Billie or just B. Strictly business, from what he’d seen. Hispanic, but second, third generation.
“Yes ma’am?”
First she looked startled. Then she laughed.
“Sweet ride, but how’ll it fit in, there in Scottsdale?”
“Any luck at all, she’ll never have to find out.”
“ She, huh?”
He waited what actors would call two beats and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She laughed again and waved toward the hood. When he told her to be his guest, she popped it. Came up for air shaking her head.
“That’s some serious head room.”
“Never know what you might need.”
“Right, and when you think you do, it usually turns out to be the wrong thing.” Her fingers had left a smudge on the hood. Noticing, she bent to wipe it with her shirt tail. A man’s denim shirt, well faded, sleeves rolled to her biceps. Loose khaki-colored cargo pants. “I wouldn’t mind taking that for a ride.”
His turn to laugh.
“Guess you heard that one before,” she said.
“Once or twice. Not in this context.”
She looked around. “Some context we got here. This the part where the music comes up, you know, strings and shit?”
“Probably not.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
In addition to oleanders, crickets and cracks, the new place had a TV, and as he sat there that night finishing up his carry-out Bento Box from Tokyo Express with hot air blowing from window to window and the swamp cooler heaving, local news gave way to a movie and suddenly he was looking into Shannon’s face.
Part of his face, actually-seen in a rearview mirror. But it was him. Shannon was the best stunt driver who ever lived, a legend really, and the one who’d given Driver a leg up, got him into the business. Bought him meals, even let him sleep on his couch. Ten months after Driver’s first solid job, on a routine stunt like hundreds he’d done before, Shannon’s car went off a cliff, somersaulted twice, and sat rocking on its back like a beetle, cameras rolling the whole time.
This movie was titled Stranger, about the self-appointed guardian of a small community. You never saw him, just his car, a Mercury, pulling up at an overlook or turning in behind a suspicious vehicle, and once in a while his arm in the window, a shadowy profile or a slice of face in the mirror, or his back and neck as he sat watching. You never found out what the man’s motivations were. The movie had been made on the cheap, so instead of an actor they’d just used Shannon for those bits. There was kick ass driving all through. Not much of a script, when you got right down to it. But the movie had that sheen that cheap films often have when the makers are shooting something they believe in, working with next to no money, time, or resources, reaching hard for effect.
Had to be an old movie, since Shannon, the parts of Shannon he could see anyway, looked young. Probably made by youngsters with little more than a gleam in their eyes and a credit card. They’d be huge now or selling real estate somewhere.
That night, as a predicted rain eased down outside, memories mixed with twisted versions of scenes from the movie in his dreams. The next day he caught the Crown Vic in the rear view and realized what it meant, he almost laughed.
No doubt about its following him. Late model, nondescript gray, two men. He’d turned off Indian School, swung up to Osborn, then onto Sixteenth and they were still there. He took a residential street, one that looked wide and inviting but that, at the end of a long, curving block, ran headlong into a maze of apartment complexes and curlicue feeders. He’d come across it months ago and from sheer force of habit filed the location away. The area was riddled with stubs of pavement abutting the street, where private driveways had been before the complexes took over. Accelerating and taking a turn or two, just enough to get out ahead, he backed into one of those stubs and shut off the engine. Cars were p
arked along the streets on both sides-another plus. Across from him two young men unloaded furniture looking to be mostly veneer from a van that dipped alarmingly each time one of them climbed aboard.
DOS AMIGOS MOVERS
WE GET THE JOB DONE
Driver got out and walked over.
“Give you a hand there?”
They looked at him, then at one another, and rightfully so, with suspicion. One was crowding six foot, light complected with startlingly black hair that swept to either side like a crow’s wings. The other was short and deeply brown, hair sparse but long, upper arms like bags filled with rocks.
“I live just up the block.” Driver hooked his head. “Back there. Work at home, fourteen-fifteen hours a day I’m nose to nose with a computer screen. Then I got to get out, move around some. You know?”
“We can’t pay you, friend.” This from the shorter one, who seemed more or less to be in charge and more or less to be doing the lion’s share of the heavy lifting.
“Don’t expect it.”
Moments later, as Driver came down the ramp with an end table in one hand, lamp in the other, he saw the Crown Vic cruise past at a slow trot. It pulled up by the Fairlane, the passenger got out and checked, looked around, got back in. Never did more than glance across at three poor slobs unloading furniture. The Crown Vic came back by twice as they emptied the van, four minutes or so between laps, so they were sweeping the complexes, looking hard for whatever signs they thought they might see. Last lap, the guy on the passenger side was talking on a phone. The Crown Vic picked up speed and was gone.
“Better get back to it, I guess,” Driver said.
“Back in the saddle, right. Hey, man-much thanks for the help. Cold beer in the cooler up front if you want one.”
“Next time.”
“ Any time.”
Two days later he’s sitting at the mall swallowing bitter coffee when the guy at the next table says “You’ve made Carl unhappy.”
Driver looked over. Thirtyish, dress shirt and slacks, could be a sales rep on break or the manager of Dillard’s across the way.
“Carl is good at one thing and one thing only. That is pretty much his life. But you lost him.”
“I take it Carl drives a grey Crown Vic.”
“And when Carl’s unhappy, it’s like…well, it’s as though small black clouds spring up everywhere.” He held up his cup. “Grabbing a refill, get you anything?”
“I’m good.”
While the man was gone, a couple of teenagers took the table. He came back and stood there silently until they got up and moved away. He sat down. Some kind of slush drink, so that he kept tilting his head back, letting the soft ice slide down his throat.
“You and Carl of the Black Cloud, I assume you’d both have the same business address.”
“More or less.”
Pretty much, more or less: evidently his visitor came from a world of approximations, one where perception, judgment, even facts, were in suspension, and could shift at a moment’s notice.
A security guard strolled by, walkie-talkie in hand, pant legs six inches too long in the crotch and well chewed at the bottom. Driver heard “down by the food court, be about,” then he was gone.
“And what business might that be?”
“Diversified, actually.” Again the man’s head went back as the cup tilted. A thin line of red slush ran down his jaw.
“For the moment it seems to be me.”
“For the moment.”
“I don’t much care for being followed,” Driver said.
“Few of us would.” He looked off at two teenagers walking out of Spencer’s. One would push the other, who’d stagger off, come back and push him. They kept at this as they proceeded down the mall. Both wore hightops without laces. “You think about stuff much? Why you’re here, what it all means?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah. Knew a guy back in law school, more years ago than I want to think about, that did. Boy thought he was going to change the world. All he had to do first, was get to what the problems were, you know?”
“He ever figure it out?”
“We’d have to dig him up and ask. Second year, he went off the fourth-floor balcony.”
Driver heard ice rasping at the cup as the man swirled it and peered inside.
“Some people look at what happens to them and they think, there’s something responsible, some invisible agent behind all this, moving things around, causing things to happen.”
“Coherence,” Driver said.
“What?”
“Coherence. What they’re looking for.”
“I guess. Then others look at the same thing and see the purposelessness of it all. That there are only lame explanations, or none. No reason or reasons behind it. Things just happen. Life, death. Everything.”
Driver finished his coffee, stood looking around for the nearest trash receptacle. It was by the column where his visitor sat. He started that way.
“As I said, I don’t much care for being followed. I particularly don’t like having people close to me killed.”
The man smiled and said, “Lie down with dogs…” That was the last thing he said. As he tilted his head back, Driver swung around from the trash receptacle, fingers tucked, middle knuckle extended, and struck him in the throat. He felt the trachea give way and fold in on itself, watched surprise hit the man’s face, then his first gasps for air.
As the man slumped and looked about wildly, as he grasped for the table and slid down it, hands at last letting go just before he hit the floor, Driver walked away.
On impulse he swung out onto I-10 and tooled down past Tempe, through Ahwatukee and Casa Grande, to Tucson. Hour and twenty minutes with the new 75-mph speed limit, then you hit town and spent damn near as long inching down Speedway or Grant. Lots of empty buildings where small shops used to be, specialty clothing, hobbies and games, pool service centers, tax preparers. A row of five or six room-sized abandoned restaurants, home-cooking, Thai, Mexican, Lebanese, daily specials still painted on windows.
He pulled up in front of the old house. If they still lived here, they’d spent some of the money on fixing up the place. A new driveway, one without the edges that had crumbled away like old cornbread and the long cracks spilling over with green shoots and ant colonies. New wooden gate to the backyard and, back there, what looked to be a room added on. Dark reddish tiles on the roof.
Chances were good they’d moved on, of course. Maybe they weren’t even alive anymore. But then again, maybe they were still here. Tucson didn’t have the shifting-sands population of its neighbor to the northwest; here, people took root.
He thought of Mrs. Smith’s thinning hair, how she’d spend half an hour each morning brushing it out and spraying it with dollar-store hairspray to make it look fuller. He remembered the tiny stifling attic room that was his. How seldom Mr. Smith spoke and, when he did, how apologetically, as though embarrassed to be asking from the world what he knew to be fully unearned attention.
So here he sat, not in a classic Stingray this time but in an old Ford. He looked around at the stands of saguaro, rock-garden front lawns, the Catalina Mountains in the distance, and remembered thinking how there were these places in the world where nothing much ever changes, civilization’s tide pools. And after eight or nine years he still remembered every word of the note he’d left when he dropped off Nino’s money and Doc’s cat.
Her name is Miss Dickinson. I can’t say she belonged to a friend of mine who just died, since cats don’t belong to anyone, but the two of them walked the same hard path, side by side, for a long time. She deserves to spend the last years of her life in some security. So do you. Please take care of Miss Dickinson, just as you did me, and please accept this money in the spirit it’s offered. I always felt bad about taking your car when I left. Never doubt that I appreciate what you did for me.
He sat with the engine idling at a purr, wondering how many neighbors stood behind curtai
ns and blinds peering out. A hummingbird fell from nowhere and hovered by his open window, framed perfectly, before again rocketing away. Nor was he one to remain long in place or past. Always another open road ahead. And much to get done back in Phoenix.
Going downstream, Phoenix to Tucson, there was the blackened, corkscrew-gnarled, unimaginably old saguaro that got decorated with broad red ribbons each Christmas, and that made him smile every time he saw it. Heading back, he always watched out for signs alongside the orchards just short of the halfway mark. Picacho Peak had seen the westernmost battle of the Civil War, when Union cavalry came upon a group of Confederates on their way to warn the Tucson garrison of Union encroachment. Yearly reenactments of the battle included cavalry, infantry, and artillery units-a far cry from the twenty-three horsemen and ninety-minute duration of the original. The area also hosted one of three units of the state prison at Florence.
So, back up the road, toward Picacho, past signs discreetly warning that hitchhikers might be escaped prisoners.
Driver thinking, Aren’t we all?
Road signs bore the marks of old target practice. Birds burrowed into the cactus and built nests there.
Bill’s eyes came open. He’d spent a lot of time lying awake trying to decide whether that ceiling was green or gray. And wondering why they would build ceilings so high in a place where people were steadily shrinking.
From down the hall came the smell of weak coffee, and behind that the smell of what had been spilled on the warmer plate and was now burning. Two staff members stood just outside his room talking about what they did last night. The food cart delivering breakfast to those unable to make it to the dining room limped and banged along on its bad wheel. Shortly after settling in, Bill had offered to fix the wheel. They looked at him oddly and said thank you but they had someone to do things like that. He soon got used to that look. And apparently their someone was hard to find.
Gray. Green. Who the fuck cared. One of his early partners, who’d been a William too, so he was Bill and the partner got to be Billy, everyone called them Bill Squared-Billy had painted his house all beige. Everything. Outside, inside, every wall. Beige couch. Beige curtains. Over the years he’d swear Billy had become beige himself.