Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  Niko tries to relax as they inch toward downtown but mostly he feels numb. Where grief ought to be is only silence, vacated space. “Are you giving a show sir?”

  Niko glances up. “Sorry?”

  “Got a gig?”

  Niko looks at the guitar case and laughs without a trace of humor. “You could say that.”

  The cabbie nods.

  Niko makes his hand let go the case but a minute later it is tracing its contours again. Somewhere up ahead that mason jar contains its featherweight of soul. Do I feel her out there really? I think I do. Then don’t let go of that.

  He fidgets on the patched green seat and watches sluggish freeway traffic and old familiar landmarks. Capitol Records tower on the right at Vine. In the hills ahead the Griffith Observatory, the Greek Theatre. His laminated past.

  Brakelights flash ahead and the Checker Cab groans to a stop near Western. “Sorry,” says the cabbie.

  Niko glares at stalled traffic.

  The hot night is unusually humid. The freeway smells of oil, rubber, gasoline. Niko’s fingers drum the guitar case. The cabbie glances at her rearview and seems to be considering. Without signaling she muscles the cab across three creeping lanes into the narrow breakdown lane and ignores the angry honks that follow in their wake. She snaps on the radio and Charlie Parker blows like Gabriel on smack. Engine valves rattle like bones in a box.

  Near the Virgil offramp the breakdown lane is blocked by firetrucks and a paramedic van. A silver Arco tanker has overturned and sloughed across the right two lanes until the bulldog radiator ornament chewed the concrete retainer wall. The eighteen wheeler’s cab is crumpled like a roadside beercan. The wet roadway gleams orange streetlight and a leaden smell of gasoline saturates the night. Firemen unreel hoses as jackbooted CHiPs pace before the halted traffic. Drivers talk on cellphones. Overhead a harpy helicopter rides a spotlight cone. Off the freeway a giant cartoon figure in a tophat looms atop the Western Exterminator Company building, hiding a mallet behind his back and admonishing a giant rat who holds a knife and fork.

  Firemen cut away the big-rig’s driver side door with the jaws of life. From out the smashed inverted truck cab comes a thin and sharpdressed man who holds a jar containing something palely glowing. Eyes in shadow and pale orange streetlight malarial on his face’s lower half. A large and twisted doll hangs glistening in the cab behind him. Arms upraised as if in belated surrender. Niko wants to look away but cannot look away. The inert form so recently breathing, thinking, driving toward its life’s conclusion without the slightest clue. Niko thinks of Van bent forward against the steering wheel of the station wagon and looking at Niko but seeing nothing anymore. Van who not ten seconds before the absurdly mild accident had been shutting Niko down about Las Vegas. The house of cards that is a human life.

  On the radio now the sibilance of bottleneck slide.

  The Black Taxi Driver wipes the mason jar clean with a white silk kerchief as heedless paramedics hurry past him into the truck cab. The CHiPs ignore him passing in their busy midst. A fireman cradling a length of hose now braces himself as it swells like a regurgitating python. He directs the spray across the freeway surface to dilute the gasoline as the Black Taxi driver strolls past him and toward the black 1933 Franklin sedan idling smoothly in the breakdown lane on the clear stretch of freeway on the other side of the wreck.

  The cabbie drums her grime-crescented nails on the steering wheel in time with the radio’s heartbreak blues and glances in the rearview at her passenger. “These old songs are still the best, I think.”

  Niko stares blankly at the cabbie and then realizes it is himself playing on the radio. Niko twenty years ago and hurt and pissed off and freighting every note with feeling.

  The cabbie stubs out her cigarillo and feathers the accelerator. Valves protest like rowdy clams. “This isn’t generally allowed,” she says. She pushes a sequence of radio buttons and then eases the cab forward and cuts right and heads between stalled lanes. Cars are not a yard apart here yet somehow the Checker Cab passes between them. Niko fights an urge to yell. On one side the orangelit concrete retainer wall flows past a foot away from the cab. On the other the firetrucks are not a foot beyond the door. Ahead the trucks and wall are only a few feet apart.

  Niko’s vision blurs. His brain can’t make it fit. “I see your radio gets some extra stations,” he says.

  The cabbie smiles tightly. “One or two.”

  Seconds later they are past the firetrucks, the wreck, the stalled traffic. Just past the wreck the Black Taxi sits purring on the other side of the road. Niko’s heartbeat ratchets up a gear. The son of a bitch is right there, a hundred feet away. The marine layer is encroaching and a misting stillness lies hardedged about the miles between the two cars and the clustered downtown skyscrapers rising futuristic in the distance, lighting up the very air about them like some alien encampment.

  Niko sees a match flare and then a cigarette glow behind the driver’s window of the Black Taxi. The window rolls down smoothly and a long thin arm emerges, gold cufflink gleaming in a crisp white cuff, glowing cigarette clamped between thumb and forefinger. The cufflink winks, the finger flicks, the cigarette arcs away, and the Black Taxi smokes rubber and leaps forward like a dragster while behind it the discarded cigarette is a tiny meteor streaking an impossible distance back toward the wrecked and bleeding tanker.

  Niko bolts forward and grips the cabbie’s seatback and yells Go.

  The Checker Cab lumbers forward and gains speed, engine valves complaining castanets. Niko looks back toward the wreck just as an aurora of paleblue flame springs from the pavement where the cigarette butt landed and races toward the leaking tanker like some kind of magic trick. Niko winces in expectation of some worldconsuming blast, but a fireman taps a hose-wielding colleague on the shoulder and points, and the man merely nods and turns with the hose and drowns the spreading curtain of pale flame.

  Niko lets out his breath and turns forward again to see the taillights of the speeding Franklin half a mile ahead. Two cars drawn like moths toward luminous downtown.

  THE LONG BLACK Franklin whips out from in front of a Fed Ex truck just before the Golden State Freeway divider and at the last possible moment angles across a broad expanse of lanes and nearly sideswipes a concrete divider at the Temple exit before it takes the exit ramp at twice the posted speed.

  “Gee,” says the cabbie. “Think he’s onto us?” She cuts the wheel and the Checker Cab slews across three lanes to the Temple offramp. Ahead of them the Franklin runs the light and slews left onto Temple beside Our Lady of the Angels cathedral.

  Niko snatches at the strap as the Checker Cab squeals around the ramp. The traffic signal just ahead turns green for them as they turn left on Temple. Tires screech to either side as drivers panic-stop for a light that went from green to red without a yellow inbetween.

  Ahead of them the Franklin turns a sudden right. The Checker Cab howls around the corner in a fourwheel drift and now they’re heading down Hill fast, driving through the Civic Center past generic slabs of government buildings. A few hundred yards ahead the Black Taxi slows to a crawl and then speeds away. The cabbie guns the engine.

  Niko grips the back of the front seat. “Where’s he trying to get to?”

  “Red Line tunnel.” The cabbie points down. “Underground.”

  They pass the entrance to the Red Line station on their left and Niko sees long steep escalators and staircases. “He’s trying to get in there from here?”

  “Not with us on his tail. He’ll head to the next station at Fourth. We’re riding above the Red Line route right now.”

  A few streets over to their left is the quaint old gumshoe movie backdrop of City Hall with the Lindbergh light revolving like a lighthouse beacon warning traffic not to founder on some downtown shoal.

  They cross Second Street and the light turns green for them. Bunker Hill a clump of skyscrapers above them and to the right. The twin towers of the California Plaza with the
ir neonbanded tops. The palegreen robot of Library Tower. The glossy tiled tube of Second Street tunnel whips by. Beyond this a black and orange gateway reading ANGEL’S FLIGHT RAILWAY stands alone along the sidewalk at the foot of the hill, railtrack slanting up to meet a matching gateway on the hilltop at the California Plaza. On the track two black and orange railway cars are shaped like parallelograms to fit along the slope.

  “He’s slowing down again.”

  The cabbie nods. “Red Line station on both sides at Fourth. And he might give that a try.” She points to a building up ahead on Fourth Street. Niko stares out at trompe l’oeil window-washers cleaning painted-on windows. “The old Subway Terminal Building. In the Twenties there was a mile’s worth of subway running under Bunker Hill. The tunnel’s still there, they broke into it when they dug the foundation for the Bonaventure in the Seventies. Runs all the way to where Beverly and Second meet.”

  “Why isn’t he going faster?”

  “He’s trying to time it so he loses us at the lights.” As if to illustrate her point the traffic light turns yellow as the Franklin speeds across Fourth Street. The Checker Cab is close behind and the light turns from yellow back to green. Two cars run the light in opposite directions and without even looking at them the cabbie taps the brakes just so and avoids a broadside.

  “I like your greenlight trick,” says Niko. Because if he doesn’t say something he will scream.

  “Good one, huh?” They pass the defunct Subway Terminal Building and the cabbie waves her cigarillo at it. “There’s a huge copy of The Thinker in the lobby of that.”

  “Do you sell maps to the stars’ homes too?”

  She arches her eyebrows in the rearview. “The Thinker was originally the figure on top of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. Which he never finished.” She smiles. “You should look up what he was working on when he died.”

  Niko studies the cabbie’s profile as they chase the Black Taxi toward the Jewelry District. Crow’s feet but her eyes seem young. Beautiful color really. Forehead that wrinkles when waiting for an answer. Beautifully sculpted lip, the upper wanting to favor one side. Barely glancing at traffic as she drives. She knows this cab and its surround like an old pair of jeans. Dark hair without gray. Hardworked hands. How old is she I wonder.

  They pass Fifth Street and the Red Line station entrance across from the yellow and purple building blocks of Pershing Square. The Black Taxi puts on speed and cuts left onto Seventh.

  The cabbie hangs a long and screaming left to follow. “I bet we’re really pissing him off,” she says. “There’s no point in him getting in there if we just follow him on through.”

  “Where’s he headed now?”

  “I’m betting Union Station. All roads lead to Rome. It’s what I’d do if I was still driving black cab.”

  The bottom falls out of Niko’s stomach. “When was that?”

  “Oh, a long time ago. In London.” She hits the gas and the engine misses once then surges and they pull around a Prius with a Harley-Davidson sticker on its rear windshield.

  Niko relaxes a bit. Driving black cab in England and driving the Black Taxi are two very different occupations. “You were on the knowledge?”

  The cabbie glances back at him. “Boy, not too many Americans know that phrase.”

  Both cars thread through sparse traffic down Seventh past jewelry stores, past grand old movie palaces fallen to ruin or converted to swap meets. The State. The Palace. The Orpheum.

  Ahead the Black Taxi fishhooks left onto Wall.

  The cabbie shakes her head. “He should’ve gone down San Pedro. This puppy deadends at Third.” The Checker Cab chortles around the corner and avoids a shopping cart in the middle of the road.

  Police station on their left, listless crowd near the L.A. Mission on their right. A man in a torn shirt steps off the curb in the midst of some tirade and brandishes a crutch at them as they speed past Korean toy marts.

  They’re at Fourth and Wall when the Franklin’s brakelights flash where Wall deadends at Third. Niko thinks the Black Taxi will turn left onto the oneway street but instead it screams a one eighty, headlights sweeping cansprayed doorways and aimless homeless people and scores of soiled sleeping bags arrayed along the sidewalks like the detritus of some apocalypse. The black sedan now faces them with wheelwells smoking like a monster breathing in the cold.

  The radio’s playing some forgotten song.

  “Boy, on the knowledge.” The cabbie shakes her head as the Black Taxi rushes toward them in their lane. Ahead and to their left is Boyd Street but they’ll never make it in time. “For most of a year I slept with a map of London taped to my ceiling.” Niko stiffens in expectation of sudden impact and metal roar. “Hundred percent on my exam too.” The cabbie leans forward and presses a sequence of radio buttons. The froglike headlights grow before them. Niko stomps a nonexistent brake and draws a hissing breath as metal interpenetrates oncoming metal. Molecules that would collide instead find empty spaces in the hurtling metal, empty space of which most things consist. The utter wrongness of this instant realignment tastes of bitter iron.

  The cars pass through each another.

  The sharp planed face of the Black Taxi driver flashes through him and he feels a terrible wrenching at his core, voracious entropy and churning chaos, leaching cancerous famished death that thrills to strip him from the fabric of his being. For a single breathless thoughtless moment he knows what it is to be hulled from self and sealed inside that mason jar.

  And past.

  The cabbie pops a match against a nail and lights another cigarillo. She yanks the wheel and stomps the brake. Niko slides right on the broad bench seat as they power onto Boyd.

  The cabbie grins at the rearview. “And you thought the greenlight trick was something.”

  Nighttime Boyd Street is a corridor of zombies. Shambling figures leached of color who threaten empty air before them with their fists, stand and stare at nothing, inventory shopping carts and grocery bags. Souls consigned to sad perdition before their death has found them.

  The cabbie weaves the big car through their wary ranks like a ship through risky shoals. They ease past vestibular Boyd, then pick up speed as they turn left onto Los Angeles Street. Still accelerating as she cuts right onto Fifth and picks up the Black Taxi speeding west ahead near Spring. Engine valves clatter like raked poker chips. On the radio Jimi Hendrix scratches out the “Steel Town Blues.”

  Traffic lights turn green or stay green for them as they rush down Fifth through the old theater district, once more heading toward the cluster of skyscrapers and Bunker Hill.

  Jimi Hendrix never recorded “Steel Town Blues.”

  They hang a right on Hill and there the Franklin is, waiting at the traffic light at Second.

  “Well well,” the cabbie says. “The fiendly stranger in the black sedan.”

  “Why’s he stopped?”

  The cabbie slows down, suddenly in no hurry to overtake the Franklin. “Listen,” she says. “There’s one place where he won’t have to force an entrance. The old Belmont Tunnel where Beverly, Glendale, and Second all come together. It’s a portal where the old Pacific Electric Railway used to go to ground. The old subway from the Twenties.”

  “It connects to the Red Line?”

  “It connects to the same thing the Red Line connects to.” The cabbie swerves around a wide-eyed mendicant standing in the middle of the road holding high a cloudy squirt bottle and a filthy rag with no more thought than if he were a roadcone. “Same thing all tunnels connect to if you know how to work em.”

  The light at Second Street turns green but the Franklin still sits motionless.

  “Why’s he letting us catch up to him?”

  “He knows he can’t shake me so he’s about to push back.” The cabbie catches his eye in the rearview. “This might be rough.” They’re coming up on the Franklin now.

  Niko throttles the strap. “I’m holding on.”

  “You’ll need to hold on to more t
han that.”

  Ahead of them the twelve-cylinder engine revs and the tires shriek and the Black Taxi hangs a left at Second and howls down the night before them. The Checker Cab follows, baying tires blending with the mournful wail of Jimi’s ghostnotes on the haunted radio as they pursue the Franklin down the throat of the Second Street tunnel. Glossy tiled walls pale orange and wetlooking in the sodium lights.

  The tunnel dims, the throat constricts. Niko starts to ask the cabbie to turn on the headlights but stops when he realizes he can’t even see her in front of him. Her everpresent cigarillo glow has vanished. Peripheral dashboard light is gone as well. The pressure of the seat beneath him and the hardcase against his hand his only reassurance of the solid real. The only light the twin red taillights up ahead.

  They brighten into burning suns and the assault begins.

  CHRISTMAS MORNING AND Niko dumped his stupid Mr. Mechano to grab the just-unwrapped Sears & Roebuck guitar from Van’s hand and his mother told him You should be ashamed of yourself while little Van looked too bewildered to even cry.

  Niko bathed in the light of his past thinks Oh you lousy motherfuckers.

  Jemma’s face when she came home to their ratty little Hollywood apartment to find him drunk on the kitchen floor pathetically piecing together blue shards of the Cookie Monster jar that fell when Niko pulled it from the top shelf to use her emergency cash to buy himself another fifth.

  Even knowing these little videos star someone Niko murdered long ago he feels the turning worm of shame for who he was.

  Stephen’s sleepy smile in the motel room holding up the hypodermic and pushing out the air and Niko fixed already and sitting on the floor with his back against the wall halfnodding off saw how big the dose was and said Hey as Stephen slid the needle underneath his tongue and shot and sank back in the chair and stared at the ceiling and stopped breathing. And Niko took the dead man’s rig and smack and cash and left and never told a soul.