James Sallis: Drive

Never mind that Nino’s entire life was stolen from others.

As Nino bent to pick up the paper, Driver stepped out of the recess beside the front door. He was there when Nino turned.

Eye to eye, neither blinked.

“I know you?”

“We spoke once,” Driver said.

“Yeah? What’d we talk about?”

“Things that matter. Like how once a man makes a deal he keeps to it.”

“Sorry. Don’t remember you.”

“What a surprise.”

Perfect round hole between his eyes, Nino staggered back against the partially opened front door, pushing it the rest of the way open. His legs remained on the porch. Varicose veins like thick blue snakes stood out on them. A slipper fell off. His toenails were thick as planks.

From somewhere back inside the house, a radio issued morning traffic reports.

Driver set the box with its large pepperoni, double cheese, no anchovies, on Nino’s chest.

The pizza smelled good.

Nino didn’t.

It looked just as he remembered.

There are all these places in the world, he thought, all these pockets of existence, where nothing much ever changes. Tide pools.

Amazing.

Mr. Smith, he assumed, was off at work, the Mrs. at one or another of her endless meetings. Church, school board, local charities.

He pulled up in front of the house.

Neighbors would be peeking out their windows, fingering slats of venetian blinds apart, wondering what business anyone driving a classic Stingray could possibly have with the Smiths.

What they saw was a young man climbing from the car, going around to the passenger side to extract a new cat carrier and a well-worn duffel bag. On the porch he set these down. He stepped close to the door, after a moment eased it open. They watched him pick up the cat carrier and duffel bag and step inside. Almost immediately he was walking back down the drive. He got in the Corvette and drove away.

He remembered how it had been, everyone knowing everyone else’s business, all the open secrets, the lot of them believing they had the only true, real life and all others were counterfeit.

Along with the cat carrier and duffel bag he’d left a note. 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.

Couldn’t have been easy for his father. Driver didn’t remember much about it, really, but even then, as a kid, dawn of the world, he’d known things weren’t right. She’d put eggs she forgot to hard-boil on the table, open cans of spaghetti and sardines and throw them together, serve up a platter of mayonnaise and onion sandwiches. For a time she’d been obsessed by insects. Whenever she found one crawling, she’d cover it with a water glass and leave it to die. Then (in his father’s words) she “took up with” a spider that established a web in one corner of the tiny half-bath where she retired each morning to apply the eyeliner, foundation, blush and cover providing the mask without which she would not launch herself into the world. She’d catch flies in her hand and throw them onto the web, prowl outside at night for crickets and moths and deliver those. First thing she’d do upon return, any time she left the apartment, was check on Fred. The spider even had a name.

Mostly, when she spoke to him at all, she just called him boy. Need any help with schoolwork, boy? Got enough clothes, boy? You like those little cans of tuna for lunch, right, boy? and crackers?

Never close to the ground, she drifted ever farther away from it, until he began to think of her as somehow exempt, not so much above this world as several steps to one side or the other of it.

Then that night at dinner with the old man spewing blood onto his plate. Ear there too, like a portion of meat. Driver’s sandwich of Spam and mint jelly on toast. As his mother so carefully set down butcher and bread knives, perfectly aligned, having no further need of them.

I’m sorry, son.

Could this be a real memory? And if so, why had it taken so long to emerge? Could his mother actually have said that? Spoken to him that way?

Imagination or memory, let it go on.

Please.

Probably I’ve only made your life more complicated. Not what I’d hoped for… Things get so tangled up.

“I’ll be okay. What’s going to happen to you, Mom?”

Nothing that hasn’t already. Time to come, you’ll understand.

Imagination. He’s pretty sure of that.

But now he finds himself wanting to tell her how, as time has gone by, he doesn’t understand.

How he never will.

Meanwhile he’d ridden his new buggy home to the latest of local habitations. Name: Blue Flamingo Motel. Weekly rates, nothing much else around and a generous expanse of parking lot, ready access to major arteries and interstates.

Settling in, he poured half a fist of Buchanan’s. Traffic sounds, TV from rooms close by. Spin, bang, slide and clatter of skateboards out on the parking lot, a favorite with neighborhood kids, apparently. Thwack of the occasional traffic or police helicopter overhead. Pipes banged in the walls whenever neighboring roomers roused and took to showers or toilets.

He picked up the phone on the first ring.

“I hear it’s done,” his caller said.

“Done as it’ll get.”

“His family?”

“All still asleep.”

“Yeah. Well, Nino never slept much himself. I told him it was a bad conscience working its bony fingers up into him. He claimed he didn’t have one.”

A moment’s silence.

“You didn’t ask how I knew where you were.”

“Tape across the bottom of the door. You replaced it, but it never quite re-adheres.”

“So you knew I’d be calling.”

“Sooner rather than later, I assumed-given the circumstances.”

“Kind of pitiful, aren’t we, the two of us? All this high technology swarming about us and here we are still relying on a piece of Scotch tape.”

“One tool’s much like another, long as it gets the job done.”

“Yeah, I know something about that. Been something of a tool myself, all my life.”

Driver said nothing.

“Fuck it. Your job’s done, right? Nino’s dead. What’s left on the plate? You see any reason this should go on?”

“It doesn’t have to.”

“Got plans for tonight?”

“Nothing I can’t ignore.”

“Okay. So here’s what I’m thinking. We get together, have a few drinks, maybe dinner after.”

“We could do that, sure.”

“You know Warszawa? Polish joint, corner of Santa Monica and Lincoln Boulevards?”

One of the ugliest streets in a city of many, many ugly streets.

“I can find it.”

“Unless you insist on pizza.”

“Funny.”

“Yeah. It was, actually. All those coupons. Place-Warszawa, you got that, right?-shares its parking lot with a carpet store, but no problem, there’s plenty of room. Around, what? Seven? Eight? What works for you?”

“Seven’s good.”

“It’s a small place, no bar or anything like that where you can wait. I’ll go on in, get us a table.”

“Sounds good.”

“Time we met.”

Putting the phone to rest, Driver poured another couple of inches of Buchanan’s. Close to noon now, he reckoned, most of the city’s good folk itching to bail on job and duty and escape to lunch or a stamp-size park somewhere. Call home, see how the kids are, place a bet with the bookie, set up a meet with the mistress. The motel was deserted. When housekeeping knocked at the door, he said he was fine, didn’t need service today.