James Sallis: Drive

Getting to be where you can’t rely on anything.

Driver spun the dial through country music, news, a talk show about aliens of the extraterrestrial sort, easy listening, country again, hard rock, another talk show about aliens of the earthbound sort, news again.

Concerned citizens of Arizona were up in arms because a humanitarian group had begun installing water stations in the desert that illegal immigrants had to cross to get from Mexico to the U.S. Thousands had perished trying to make the crossing. Concerned citizens of Arizona, Driver noted, came out all in a breath, like weapons of mass destruction or the red threat.

Meanwhile the state legislature was trying to pass statutes barring illegal aliens from free medical care in Arizona’s overburdened, uncompensated emergency rooms and hospitals.

Doc should start up a franchise.

Driver pulled onto the interstate.

They’d sent a single dog after him? And a new dog to boot, not even pick of the litter. That was plain stupid, made no sense whatsoever.

Or maybe it did.

Two possibilities.

One: they were trying to set him up. His designated assassin wouldn’t talk, of course. But if Driver had killed him-as whoever sent him had every reason to expect-police even now would be going door to door and checking apartment-house records. All over California and adjoining states, fax machines would be rousing from slumber to spit out stats of the photo from Driver’s old DMV records and whatever other information about him could be unearthed. There wasn’t a lot; even back then, instinctively, he kept his head down.

The second possibility hardened to reality when a blue Mustang came up around the chain of cars behind him outside Sherman Oaks, lodged in his rear view mirror, and wouldn’t be shaken.

So not only did they have a tail on him, they wanted him to know they had a tail on him.

Driver cut abruptly off the interstate and into a service area, bypassing the inner loop. Pulled in and sat, engine purring, out by the truckers. Nearby, a family spilled from its van with dogs in tow, parents shouting at kids, kids shouting at dogs and one another.

The Mustang materialized behind him, in his mirror.

Okay then, he thought. My game now.

Popping the clutch, he shot along the service road. As he gained speed, his eyes swept constantly from rear view mirror to highway and back again. With a car length to spare, he slid onto the highway between two semis.

But he couldn’t lose the son of a bitch whatever he tried.

Periodically he’d go off-road, blend into local traffic to take advantage of it, interpose traffic lights like blockades between himself and his pursuer. Or back on the interstate he’d accelerate with blinkers going as though to take the off ramp, drop in front of a rig, then, once out of sight, floor it and surge ahead.

Whatever he did, the Mustang hung there behind like a bad memory, history you can’t escape.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

Well out of the city, out where the first of a crop of white windmills, lazily turning, wound sky down to desert, Driver sailed without warning onto an exit ramp and into a one-eighty. Sat facing back the way he’d come as the Mustang raced towards him.

Then he hit the gas.

He was out for a minute or two, no more. An old stunt man’s trick: at the last moment, he’d thrown himself into the back seat and braced for the collision.

The cars struck head-on. Neither was going to leave on its own steam, but the Mustang, predictably, got the worst of it. Kicking his door open, Driver climbed out.

“You okay?” someone shouted from the window of a battered pickup idling at the bottom of the off ramp.

Then the long blare of a horn and a squeal of brakes as a Chevy van skidded to a stop, rocking, behind the pickup.

Driver stepped up to the Mustang. Sirens in the distance.

Gordon Ligocki’s ducktail would never look good again. His neck was broken. Internal damages too, judging from the blood around his mouth. Probably slammed into the steering wheel.

Driver still had the coupons for Nino’s Pizza.

He tucked one into Gordon Ligocki’s shirt pocket.

He hitched a ride with the guy in the pickup, whose emergence with an aluminum baseball bat had sufficiently adjusted attitudes among the youthful crew of the van as to send them spinning away into traffic.

“What I’m guessing is you may have good reason not to be around once the Man arrives,” he said when Driver approached him. “Know more than a little about that myself. Get on up here.”

Driver climbed aboard.

“Name’s Jodie,” he said a mile or so down the road, “but nearabouts everyone calls me Sailor.” He pointed to a tattoo on his right bicep. “Supposed to be a bat wing. Looks like a mainsail.”

Professionally done tattoos-the bat, a woman in a grass skirt with coconut shells for breasts, an American flag, a dragon-covered his biceps. Hands on the steering wheel bore another sort of tattoo. Jailhouse tattoos, crudely done with ink and the end of a wire. Most times, that meant a guitar string.

“Where’re we headed?” Driver asked.

“Depends… Town not far up the road has a decent enough dinner. You hungry by any chance?”

“I could eat.”

“How did I know?”

It was a classic small-town noontime buffet, steam trays piled high with slices of meat loaf, shrimp, hot wings, beans and franks, home fries, roast beef. Sides of cottage cheese, three-layer Jell-O salad, green salad, pudding, carrot and celery sticks, green bean casserole. Clientele a mix of blue-collar workers, men and women from offices nearby in short-sleeve dress shirts and polyester dresses, blue-haired old ladies. These last came out in their tank-like cars around one o’clock each afternoon, Jodie told him, heads barely visible above steering wheel and dash. Everyone else knew to get off the streets then.

“You don’t have work you need to be tending to?” Driver asked.

“Nope, time’s my own. Have Nam to thank for that. I’m up for armed robbery, see, and the judge says he’ll give me a choice, I can enlist or I can go back to prison. Didn’t much care for it the first time round, didn’t have any notion it would have got much better. So I slide through basic, ship out, then along about three months in, I’m sitting there having the first of my usual breakfast beers when a sniper takes me down. Spilled the whole can. Fucker’s been up there all night waiting.

“They airlift me to Saigon, take out half of one lung and pack me back Stateside. Disability’s enough to get by on, long as I don’t develop a taste for much more than greasy hamburgers and cheap hootch.”

He threw back the rest of his coffee. The hula girl on his arm shimmied. Spare flesh like a turkey’s wattles swung beneath.

“Had the feeling you might have seen action yourself.”

Driver shook his head.

“Prison, then. You’ve been inside.”

“Not yet.”

“And here I’d of sworn…” He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. “What the hell do I know, anyway.”

“How’s the rest of your day look?” Driver said.

Like shit, apparently. And like usual. Jodie’s home was a trailer in Paradise Park back towards the interstate. Abandoned refrigerators, stacks of bald tires and tireless, decaying vehicles sat everywhere. Half a dozen dogs in the compound barked and snarled nonstop. Jodie’s kitchen sink would have been heaped with dishes if he’d had enough dishes to heap. Those few he had were in the sink, and looked to have been there for some time. Grease swam in the runnels of stove-top burners.

Jodie snapped on the TV when they first came in, rooted around in the sink, rinsed out a couple of glasses with tap water and filled them with bourbon. A scabrous dog of uncertain parentage made its way out of the back of the trailer to greet them, then, exhausted by the effort, collapsed at their feet.