I don’t want to go back there, said the girl, gathering her jacket around her shoulders, He glanced at them and they both shot him a look back. He quickly averted his gaze and felt the rattle of a truck pulling slowly past. The building vibrating up through his boots and making his ears tingle.
Where else is there? said the young man, we’ve run out of places to go. The door opened and a woman in a peaked cap walked in, took a black marker pen from a cup next to a large board and started writing down the bus times for the rest of that day. The pen squeaked with each stroke. He saw that there were four buses coming through that afternoon. He looked at the board and determined to take the third one wherever it was going. The young man got up and stood close to the board as if willing the list of destinations to change. He sat next to the girl and said something to her and she shook her head softly and then rested it on his shoulder, pulling her legs up underneath her as she did so. A bus came into view, describing a wide arc and momentarily blotting out the afternoon light with its glass and chrome bulk. It shuddered to a stop and passengers, some he recognised from the visiting hall at the prison, trooped past, their shoulders low, their posture inclined towards the slight hill that led up along the curved road that would eventually take them to the jail and out of sight. One man nodded at him as if in recognition and he knew that he must have passed him as he sat waiting for his father or brother to come and see him. It always took longer than any one of them would have liked to filter through the combination of gates and bag searches before they arrived in the main visitors’ hall itself. His brother, without fail, would always ask him what in the hell he was doing in there. It was a signal that he’d already run out of things to say. His father was more reflective and would bring him books and critique them slowly before handing them over. He’d sit there opposite his son with his hand laid flat across the book cover and explain the nuances of the plot, the strengths and flaws of the characters, sometimes even revealing the story’s denouement before pausing theatrically and then apologising in a soft voice. Only then would he slide the book across to him. He looked forward to both their visits, though. His brother would reveal sports results as if they were magical tricks he’d pulled from the air. He half expected him to reach over and pull a quarter from behind his ear each time he told him that the Bears had lost.
We get the papers here, he’d say to his brother. We’ve got a TV room, I see the sports results. But his brother would wave the words away like a cynic dismissing an urban myth and start in with a very literal blow-by-blow account of a title fight he’d seen the previous Saturday night.
Sadly, his brother had got married and moved away which made his visits less frequent the last few years. His father had died two years before when his heart gave out as he was crossing the street three blocks from their home. In the letter his brother had written him afterwards, he told him how his father had reached out and touched the bonnet of a car that had paused to let him pass. The engine idled while his dad had rested there a moment, one hand flat on the bodywork as if it were a book, and then he placed the other palm across his pressed shirt and slid silently to the floor, his head coming to rest against the fender of the car. The car’s driver had told the police that he looked like Jimmy Stewart lying there. As he sat in prison reading the letter he was pleased with the analogy, it made him think that his dad’s death was peaceful, dignified. His brother had offered to come and get him when he was released, even suggesting he stay while he got back on his feet, but he wanted to roam a little first. He promised to head west to his brother eventually, but for now it was imprecise patterns and hasty plans that he wanted to make.
He’d gone to California as a young man to dream. He vaguely imagined attending film school (waking from sleep, he often saw himself helming a camera, shouting directions attracting admiring glances from his cast and crew), but when he got there, he found that all the women were actresses and all the men potential leads waiting on their break or embittered hacks who only resembled the successful scriptwriters and novelists they emulated in the amount of booze they drank. He was three weeks away from having to give up his tiny apartment at the Villa Elaine when he got a temp job at a suddenly prospering talent agency. He fetched coffee, ran scripts and tapes between departments and offices, manned the front desk and phones and then one day his boss asked him to take an envelope to one of the agency’s biggest names. He was the lead in a popular comedy drama that had earnt him a Golden Globe nomination. He lived in an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a fashionable chunk of the Hollywood hills and was in a robe and a pair of shorts when he answered the door. He was charming and his skin glowed as if he’d just stepped off a sunbed or been freshly moulded from plastic; he looked malleable.
Drink? he beamed, walking very quickly towards the kitchen. He’d plucked the envelope from his hands as soon as he’d let him in.
Sure, he said uncertainly as he stood admiring the view of the parched hills and the uncertain white apartment blocks and houses below. Even with the unrelenting air conditioning he could feel the sun through the glass. He looked for the Hollywood sign, but he couldn’t see it. The actor returned holding two tall glasses filled with something clear and lots of ice that clinked as he handed it across.
Vodka and tonic, the actor said. That okay?
He nodded and with a gesture the actor invited him to sit. A low glass table with a chessboard sunk into its centre stood between them. The actor opened the envelope and tipped its contents on to the board.
Checkmate, he said and he smiled broadly.
He imagined it was something the actor had said before. The cocaine was compacted from the envelope, but the actor quickly broke it down with a razor blade he’d produced from his pocket. He scooped some up on the corner of the blade and snorted it loudly before offering the blade across and indicating he take some. The actor tipped his head back and sighed happily, then took a long gulp of vodka; he was smiling expectantly, his robe hanging open, he was the kind of brilliant brown you see in imported furniture stores.
He balanced a small crumbling mound of cocaine on the blade and brought it quickly towards his nose before he spilt it. It felt clean and instantaneous as it rushed through him. He looked up at the actor who was holding his drink forward for him to toast. They touched glasses and he said cheers while the actor saluted him with his free hand. Then the actor leant forward and pushed more cocaine on to the blade before inhaling it hungrily, then he dabbed his finger into the powder and rubbed it emphatically on to his gums, poking out his tongue, so his smile looked lopsided.
He didn’t go back to the office that afternoon; he didn’t go back to the office again. He doubted they’d let him back in if he did. The actor said he liked him, said he could use him, asked him if he needed a job.
I’ve got this one, he said, but the actor just laughed incredulously. It transpired that the actor didn’t just get nominated for Golden Globes, win critical plaudits and ingest cocaine, he moved it around town too. He only dealt to friends and associates, he said, and needed someone to deliver it on his behalf, someone, he said, waving the razor blade around, that wouldn’t get into his own stash, someone he could trust. Because, and he emphasised the word, wrapped his lips around it, people trusted him and who was anyone without their reputation, especially in this town.
He stopped and looked around as if only just realising that it was dusk and his apartment was now dark. His head bobbed and his snorting seemed like it was the only sound ricocheting around the hills. He looked up, a white frosting crusted around his nose. It looked like it was glowing in the half-light.
Got a car? the actor asked.
He spent the summer moving from one gated community to another, from isolated hilltop mansions, gleaming and white, to sprawling ranch houses with their own basketball courts and views of the city he’d never seen before. Sometimes, he’d swoop back down into the canyon and feel like he was riding a helicopter over the jutting brows of the hill,
LA below, dusty and listless in the daytime, expansive and dreamlike at night. He’d visit the actor three, sometimes four times a week to pick up the supplies and his cash and then he’d work his regular route unless there was a major party or launch happening and then the demand would rise, like people ordering in extra milk over the holidays. The actor would insist that they celebrate their good fortune and thriving business before he set out. A razor loaded with cocaine and a tall glass of vodka and he’d be back out on the sharply inclined streets feeling fresh and alert, always driving too fast for the first twenty minutes or so.
He’d overdone it one night. Sometimes when he’d take a delivery it would be a simple exchange of one envelope for another. Other times he’d be invited in and, much like the first time he met the actor, be asked to hang out, share the cocaine he’d brought and have a drink. It was hard to say no. Firstly, he didn’t want to alienate the client (and sometimes it would be a producer or actor he admired) and after the first hit he’d taken at the actor’s house he almost always wanted a top-up.
The palatial white house he drove up to was beyond large gates and a grand circular driveway. It was so bright in the sun that it looked burnished. Two huge marble columns stood impassively either side of the heavy twin doors, one of which was ajar revealing a black-and-white checked hallway and a staircase that he could imagine Fred Astaire dancing down. The producer was playing cards with some friends out at the back of the house on a sundeck beneath a large Sol beer umbrella; it looked incongruously cheap given the grandeur of the house. The view, even by the standard of the vistas he’d experienced the last few months, was breathtaking. They were so high up he felt dizzy, the city was like a glistening speck below them, the struts beneath the sundeck the only thing keeping them from falling into the valley below. He swayed slightly and wondered if it was vertigo. The producer shook his hand firmly and asked him to sit. Like the actor he dumped the contents of the envelope onto the table and his friends laughed and cheered. Rolled-up bills were quickly produced and he was invited to dip in with the rest of them. Someone he vaguely recognised from an old TV show he’d watched as a kid handed him a beer and clapped him on the shoulder. Hours later, at the producer’s insistence, he was racing down the valley, jumpy at every intersection, back to the actor’s house to replenish their supply. The producer had a party that night and now had the creeping fear that the coke he’d ordered wasn’t going to be enough.
He worried that he was going too fast and then that to overcompensate that he was going too slow. He checked his rearview mirror assiduously for cops, but it was quiet up here, the only real danger he faced was the sudden curves in the road that encouraged him to race into the sky.
The actor, who was still in his robe, was delighted to see him.
He likes you, he jabbered, wagging a finger at him; I knew the customers would like you, that’s why I gave you the job. You’re personable, like me. They were both strung out, sniffing heavily and pinching their noses; the actor kept touching his cheek, unsure if the numbness was in his face or fingertips. The drive back up and along the valley wall was like a dream, the cooling air rigid and unresisting as it coursed through the open windows of the car. The producer’s house had started to hum with life like he imagined Gatsby’s mansion once had and then he remembered that Gatsby was a character in a book and he laughed stupidly.
He came to the next morning in the back seat of his car, his nose was full and there was a grey residue under his nails and on his teeth. He sat up and then lay quickly back down again as his stomach churned and something came loose behind his eyes. He checked his watch and groaned at the time, forced himself to sit up and pulled himself into the front seat. The producer’s house stood almost solemnly behind him, both doors now wide open, a lone girl in a sheer-looking cocktail dress sitting cross legged on the rim of the fountain that was the centrepiece at the heart of the circular drive. It had been flowing last night, but was now as still as if the sun had burnt it out. He imagined his racing heart was louder than the radio as he put the car into gear and started to roll slowly down the hill. He reached into the glove compartment and felt about, glancing up occasionally at the road unfurling before him. He found what he had been looking for, an envelope that still had to be delivered later that day. He placed it onto the seat next to him and pulled over, scooped some of the contents onto his nail and quickly thrust it into his nose. His forehead was damp and his hair clung to it, he pushed it back and felt revulsion when he realised how heavily he was sweating. He pulled slowly out into the road and picked his way down the hill, intermittently dabbing at the envelope as he tried to stabilise his equilibrium and stop himself from throwing up. He felt parched. He pulled over at the first store he found and bought a bottle of water which he gulped down at the counter much to the astonishment of the teenage boy who was working there. He must have looked wild. He knew the water was cascading over his chin and chest but his thirst was insatiable. He slammed the plastic bottle onto the counter top with a wide-eyed grin and thanked the boy a little too loudly before he left. He stood outside and noticed the police that were parked across the road from the store. He clambered into his car, keeping one hesitant and fearful eye across the street. He pulled away from the store and ran quite slowly into a car that was coming the other way. He’d forgotten to secure his seat belt and cracked his head sedately, almost methodically, against the windscreen. He sat back with a dazed thud and by the time he’d turned around to the passenger seat there were the policemen looking in through the open window at him, a young officer already had the envelope and its spilt contents in his hands.
He wouldn’t give the actor up and so for the first two years of his sentence he found himself in a maximum-security unit in southern California. He refused to meet anyone’s eye and did his best to melt into the walls and between the bars when any of the gang members who made up the majority of the prison’s population passed him. He ended up sharing a cell with a convicted murderer the other prisoners had christened Cornflakes, though never to his face. That gave him a degree of respect among the other inmates: sharing a cell with a murderer had earnt him points in a scoring system he didn’t understand.
I don’t know how you can bear it, someone said to him while they were taking their exercise time. The differing gang factions dominated large swathes of the yard, eyeing each other murderously, but those that chose to just exist and stay small tended to congregate at the back wall beneath the two armed observation towers. Very little trouble ever started there. He squinted at the other prisoner; he didn’t know what he meant.
Cornflakes, he said, killed his wife and little girl, gutted them both. When the police found him he was squatting naked over the daughter eating cornflakes out of her guts with a spoon. You didn’t know? The other prisoner looked at him with incredulity.
Man, we thought you had balls of steel to sleep in a bunk underneath that guy night after night.
Someone like that shouldn’t be in here, he said, and he knew his voice was shaking. Shouldn’t he be in a psychiatric unit or something? The other prisoner shrugged. Don’t knock it, the prisoner said. In one way or another he’s looking out for you in here.
And that’s how it was until they moved him up to a facility near Chicago twenty-five months later. Its lower security rating was reflected in the prisoners themselves. There were still flare-ups, sudden outbursts of violence, but like him, a lot of the inmates had come from much tougher places and now quietly revelled in the relative calm that none of them wished to shatter.
The second bus had left the station carrying the young couple with it. They’d exited through the door heading east with imploring eyes, hands clutched tightly around one another. He could only wish them well as they paused at the bus door. Then they were sealed in and carried off along a road to who knew where. He checked his watch as the bus driver waved him aboard and took a window seat near the back. He thought he recognised some of the countryside around here, but it had been so long
since he’d seen it he could never be sure. He was heading north from Chicago and had no idea about what he might do next, but he had some money in his pocket and knew that even a dingy motel room would seem like luxury after where he’d spent the better part of a decade. The bus pulled into a gas station that doubled up as a convenience store with a large separate washroom out by the back. They could have been anywhere, but he knew they were somewhere outside of Milwaukee, heading away from it he thought. He saw something in the off ramps and the sloping highway to his right that he couldn’t discern but he knew. He felt the memories rekindling within him, he remembered being young and driving around with his friends, out of the suburbs and dangerously fast along these roads, smoking cigarettes and worrying their dreams down. I’m going to move out to the coast, he told them a hundred times as the streetlights reflected off their roof and the dark streets passed by in hazy blocks.
Cross Country Murder Song Page 5