James Sallis: Driven

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 curtains 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.

That was what being in this place was like.

In the dream from which he awakened, the bullets had struck softly, dimpling, then casting up puffs of dust and debris. They made soft pops, like the sound of lips being pulled gently apart.

The bullets (my bullets, as he always thought of them, the ones intended for me) had gone into the wall to his left and right. The shooter was nervous and new at this. The shooter was twelve years old.