James Sallis: Driven

He remembered Manny back when he was on one of his favorite harangues about words and misuse of same. They were drinking in a dive out by LAX, a self-styled blues bar, some guy playing guitar with his teeth at two in the afternoon for an audience of four dedicated drunks, a hooker, a couple of Japanese businessmen in suits, and them. Manny’d slammed back another glass of wine and taken a sudden turn.

“You ever look at a thesaurus? One-third of the damn thing is index. That’s the way our lives are. We spend a third of it trying to figure out the other two-thirds.” You never knew what was going on in there with Manny.

With anyone, really.

Like that guy over by the Coke machine, shaved eyebrows and head, jailyard stance, forested with tattoos. Looked like a thousand he’d known. Only this guy’s tattoos were all religious-he was walking stained glass-and he had the sweet smile of a child.

“It’s like everything else in life,” Manny had said yesterday on the phone. “You have to decide what you want, else you just keep spinning around, circling the drain. You want to get away from the guys?”

“Sure I do.”

“Or you want to put them down?” He waited, then laughed. “Well, there it is, then. We ponder and weigh and debate. While in silence, somewhere back in the darkness behind words, our decisions are made.”

Driver wasn’t sure he’d ever made a decision, not in the sense Manny meant. You stayed loose and when the time came, you looked around, saw what was there, went with it. Not that you let things push you, but you moved faster with the current than against. It was like reading signs, following spoor.

Manny of course would insist that such claims were BS that bore the stain of religion.

“Signs? What bleedin’ signs? What, someone put up speed limits, cattle crossings?” Anything not completely rational, for Manny it was the religious impulse incognito or in drag. That day at the blues bar he’d got onto atheists.

“Worse than Christians. So dead certain and full of themselves. Got their own little religion going, don’t they. Own set of rituals, psalms, Hanukkahs, hosannahs. Can’t say a word to them they’ll hear.”

Then, in his usual hopscotch, dropping in random accents and cadences from scripts he’d recently worked on:

“Free will, my hairy ass. What we believe, books we hold in high regard, hell, even the music we listen to-it’s all programmed, my boy, burned into us by heredity, background, what we’re exposed to till it takes. We think we make choices. But what happens is the choices walk up, stand face to face with us, and stare us down.”

“So you believe a man’s path, the way of his life, is set?”

“Re: belief, see above. But yes, we come suddenly alive, we scamper around like a cockroach when lights go on, and then the light goes off.”

“That’s damned bleak, Manny.”

“No argument here. But those moments of light, as we scamper-they can be glorious.”

A decision? Maybe when he’d come above ground. But, really, hadn’t he drifted there too? Fetched up in an apartment out in Mesa with enough of a cut from the last job that he needn’t worry about getting back to work any time soon. Everything close to the ground and earth-colored, sky stretched out for miles overhead and all around, bright baking sun, shadows with edges like blades. Walking to meals, he passed an upholstery shop, two churches, Happy Trails Motel, a quick-serve oil and lube, BJ’s Hobby amp; Stamp Store, a Thai restaurant the size of a house trailer, apartment complex after apartment complex with names like Desert Palms, filling stations, used tire shops, Rainbow Donuts. What first had seemed to him exotic-from another world, quite literally-began to take on the tincture and unremarked weight of the familiar.

For a time it felt almost as though he were back in foster homes, as though he’d been dropped into yet another temporary location. Any moment they’d come retrieve him, take him elsewhere.

A week went by. Then another. Waitresses knew him by sight now. Cooks having a smoke out back of the Thai place waved as he passed.

Somewhere in there, halfway down a block perhaps, or while crossing a street, somewhere between one first light and nightfall, he realized this was it, he wasn’t going back to the old life.

He was 26, and on his way to becoming Paul West.

Twenty-six, with no employment history to speak of, no references, no commercial skills and few enough social ones. One thing he knew. He knew cars.

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.”